All those whacknut e-mail scams have provoked a kind of ad hoc cybermilitia to take it right to the swine – inventing "elaborate, often outrageous identities" to take on, humiliate, and waste the con men's time and resources. And they document the battles in places like Scamorama, while also gathering financial and technical information on the scammers and pass it on to law enforcement. Some of the tactics, however, might be nudging the line of legality, especially things like disabling fake bank Websites or breaking into the scammers' e-mail accounts to warn the victims they already have on their rolls.
"There are all these people in America getting robbed blind, and what I'm doing is trying to stop it," said one unnamed Australian computer technician who goes under the pseudonym Stuart de Baker Hawke, whose specialties are said to include figuring out e-mail account passwords used by the scammers. "I think of myself as an Internet-security type person."
Then, there's a Nebraska manufacturing executive who says he's had a lot of laughs at the scammers' expense. "They have spent countless hours creating fake documents, obtaining photos of themselves holding funny signs, running to the Western Union miles away from where they live to obtain money which I never actually sent, and printing out counterfeit checks to send me," he said. "Hopefully, along the way, I've diverted enough of their time and resources to keep them from successfully scamming at least one hapless (albeit, most likely, greedy) victim."…
Okay, that's one way to fight cybercrime. Another way is said to be creeping toward U.S. Senate ratification: a controversial treaty that would require participating nations to update their laws to reflect such computer crimes as hacking, worm and virus releases, and copyright infringement. It's the Council of Europe's cybercrime treaty – so far ratified by Albania, Croatia, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, and Romania – and it is said to include arrangements for "mutual assistance and extradition" among participants. The Bush Administration is said to support the proposal, and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is said to be pushing for an expeditious ratification…
From our "Well, That Was Fast" Department: One day after a General Accounting Office report found you can buy narcotics online without prescriptions and without a lot of complications, two Congressmen unwrapped a new bill aiming to protect consumers from unsafe prescriptions bought at online pharmacies. Reps. Greg Walden (R-Oregon) and Jim Davis (D-Florida) said they were looking to make a uniform standard to guarantee all American-based Net pharmacies conform to rigorous Food and Drug Administration safety standards and state regulations for operating pharmacies. "Potent drugs, including addictive narcotics, can be ordered without a prescription, and the federal agencies are powerless to protect the American people from illegal and unethical behavior on the part of many Internet pharmacies operating in the United States," Walden told a news conference…
Enough critics say CAN-SPAM packs anything but enough bang, and state lawmakers around the U.S. are making their own localized anti-spam laws, for better or worse. The latest: New Jersey. Both houses of the state legislature have spam-busting bills pending, with the state assembly passing a senate anti-spam bill this week and both sides hoping the governor signs it by the end of the year. This bill is said to pack a huge punch compared to the federal and other states' versions: putting the biggest offenders in the pokey. It would also give private citizens and Internet service providers the power to sue spammers and e-mail fraudsters…
The Chinese government would like to give Chinese Websites, ISPs, and other Internet-related organizations across the country a little self-discipline push. The government has invited all the above to sign a self-discipline pact "designed," the Xinhua official news agency says, "to protect online intellectual property rights as well as prevent cybercrime, the spread of harmful information, and unhealthy competition." (We could be wrong, but don't two out of the last three seem synonymous under the Chinese Communist regime?) The pact is said to contain four chapters and 31 articles, implemented by the China Internet Association, and stressing a self-disciplinary mechanism "to advance the healthy and orderly development of the Internet industry in China… The pledge encourages lawful, fair and orderly competition and values the protection of intellectual property, network security, and the elimination of deleterious information from the Internet." (Deleterious to whom? Three guesses.)…
America, of course, looks at things a little differently when it comes to the Internet. Even when it involves the government's Websites. Consider the latest Customer Satisfaction Index findings, which say the State Department's student Website and the Federal Aviation Administration Website were the most improved over a nine-month period, with other improved government sites – based on content, appearance, searchability, and other functions – including the Office of Personnel Management recruitment site, the State Department's job site, and the National Library of Medicine…
Syria, on the other hand, has something in common with China when it comes to cyberspace: They've imprisoned a man said to have downloaded material from a banned émigré site and sent it to others via e-mail. "[P]ublishing false news that saps the morale of the nation" got Abdel Rahman al-Shaghouri two and a half years in the clink for his trouble, with four other Syrians said to face similar charges. Amnesty International is urging Syria to release all five, whose lawyer told reporters the cases indicate a Syrian determination to remain a backward nation…
The phish are swimming anywhere but backwards, alas. The latest known phish involves an e-mail message resembling a Citibank communiqué, right down to the bank's actual logo. With a subject line saying, "Protect yourself from Internet fraud," and a first line reading, "Financial institutions around the world have always been subject to attempts by criminals to try and defraud money from them and their customers…" (gee, whiz – how did they figure that out?), the e-mail is really a phish looking for your debit card and other personal identification numbers. Citibank has begun posting known intercepted phishing solicitations using Citibank imagery and trademarks.
