As if Sasser wasn't sassy enough with its slowdowns of cyberspace since it launched last weekend, we need this about as badly as the Incredible Hulk needs steroids, and at a point where Sasser's spread was slowing down a little bit more, yet: a new Netsky variant claiming to be a Sasser fix is on the loose.
"The latest Netsky worm is incredibly sneaky in the social engineering it uses to infect innocent computer users. It knows people are panicking right now about Sasser so it presents itself as a fix for Sasser from one of several well-known antivirus firms," Sophos senior tech consultant Graham Cluley told a reporter. "All users should be wary of launching unsolicited e-mail attachments."
Sasser as of this writing was believed infecting hundreds of thousands of personal computers. And F-Secure antivirus research director Mikko Hyppoenen is comparing Sasser to Blaster: "MSBlast was one of the largest virus incidents of 2003 and even caused problems to infrastructure systems such as ATM networks and train and air travel systems," he said. "I hope administrators have improved security since then. Otherwise we might see similar problems again."
Some might say security improvement in cyberspace and out of it isn't just for worms and bugs anymore - not with terrorist organizations including al Qaeda maintaining publicly accessible Websites, and even using tools like instant messaging and bulletin boards to pass instructions, plot, and plan. The good news, according to National Business Week: Those sites get shut down soon enough by governments once they're discovered. And, some of them can even be sting operations by various intelligence agencies, some experts believe.
And, if it isn't terrorists, it's neo-Nazis actual or alleged, as a Milford (Massachusetts) Public Library librarian learned just after the library's board issued a statement denouncing bigotry. The librarian found a small pile of American Nazi Party fliers on a table in the young adult section last weekend, while a patron found one tucked inside a book about the Holocaust. An Anti-Defamation League spokesman looking into the incidents thinks the fliers were downloaded from the ANP's Website, though the library said it doesn't try to stop people from surfing theirs or other actual or alleged hate sites on library computers.
Speaking of wormy behavior, the Gartner research folks say phishing - e-mail made to resemble legitimate Websites or their correspondence but actually tying to anything but the sites they disguise themselves as being, and hoping to trick the unsuspecting into giving up sensitive personal information - is running as rampant as piranha to a blood meal and getting worse. A new Gartner study covering the twelve months preceding April 2003 says up to 30 million adults have experienced phish attacks and 1.78 million could have fallen for the fishy scams, with 76 percent of the known phish attacks happening in the final six months of the period under study.
Tax scofflaws in Massachusetts face another kind of Internet worminess: what the state considers their own, in terms of their tax delinquencies, if they owe $25,000 or more. Massachusetts has begun posting their names in cyberspace. They began by posting 1,481 names of individuals or businesses May 5, after first putting them on notice of the possibility nine months ago and giving them six months to pony up. Those who didn't got a second notice giving them ninety days. Those who still didn't, their names are now up in cyberlights.
On a different tax front, add eBay to the chorus warning lawmakers against taxing the Net. Chief executive May Whitman says taxing Net access and Net sales could force eBayers and other new businesses who make their living buying and selling online to close up shop. "To add responsibility for tracking, remitting, and reporting taxes outside of their home states, across potentially 45 states and thousands of tax jurisdictions, could likely shut them down," Whitman said.
Google could face a taxing problem of its own with their attention-getting initial public offering stock auction: new temptations, according to some analysts, to do what enough already accuse it of trying to do through programs like Gmail: use its fattening user information database to steer more customers to cash-paying advertisers. "Market pressure," said the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Kevin Bankston, "would push them to monetize that information. They aren't doing it yet, but they can."
Child porn is a hugely taxing Internet problem and the struggle continues. The latest conquest, so far: Barrington, Illinois swim coach Joshua Delcore, indicted this week on ten counts of child porn possession, after investigators found over five hundred images of young nude girls on his personal computer network. But the most he can serve is one to three years in prison if he's convicted - Illinois law for now calls for child porn punishments to be served concurrently.
China thinks it's time to crack down on unlicensed Internet cafes whom the regime says admit juveniles and spread "unhealthy information" (ho ho ho) in cyberspace. They've just closed about 8,600 such cybercafes, an extension of the crackdown Beijing began in February. And, get this: the General Administration for Industry and Commerce said the cybercafes were harmful to teens' mental health and interfered with teaching in schools. Their evidence? Two junior middle school students crushed to death by a Chungking train March 31 - after they fell asleep on the tracks following turns of over 48 hours in a cybercafe surfing the Net. Right. Someone put a gun to their heads and forced them to surf for 48 hours.
A Connecticut woman isn't going to be sentenced to lay down asleep on the tracks for the 5:15 express to New Haven, but Jennifer Brothers was fined $6,000 for downloading copyrighted music from the Internet. Brothers claimed she never got official notice of the recording industry lawsuit, didn't know the practice was illegal, and called her treatment "very unfair." The fine came because Brothers didn't show up in court for a hearing the final week of April, prompting federal judge Janet Hall to hold her in default.
Last year, Rona Subotnik and Marlene Maheu's Infidelity on the Internet: Virtual Relationships and Real Betrayal (reviewed, in fact, by yours truly, in AVN Online) argued that online affairs were anything but harmful and not properly adulterous liaisons. This year, more and more observers of the phenomenon are seeing and raising those two authors, arguing that cyberaffairs just might be close to being equal to offline affairs when it comes to provoking divorce. "I think the Internet has been the single most significant factor in the accelerating divorce trend," New York divorce lawyer and author Robert Stephan Cohen told the New York Daily News. "It's amazing how many people come in here and say the Internet has been a source of things that go awry."
Indeed. The American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers told the paper 62 percent of those they surveyed said the Net had a big role in divorces they handled in the previous year, 68 percent of those cases involved one spouse meeting an online lover, and 56 percent involving one spouse showing "an obsessive interest" in Internet porn.
Ladies and gentlemen, it's Heatter Time - there's good news tonight: A North Carolina girl, who ran off with a man she met through an online chat room devoted to Goth culture, has been found safe, after she called her father from the man's home in Leland . The high school student from Camden Hills was first reported missing when a woman who knew her told police. The 25-year-old man's name is not yet revealed, because he hasn't yet been charged with any crime, police told local media.
