Press

“Widespread Hijacking of Search Traffic in the United States”
August 4, 2011 | Peter Eckersley, the Electronic Frontier Foundation

Earlier this year, two research papers reported the observation of strange phenomena in the Domain Name System (DNS) at several US ISPs. On these ISPs' networks, some or all traffic to major search engines, including Bing, Yahoo! and (sometimes) Google, is being directed to mysterious third party proxies.

“US Internet Providers Hijacking Users’ Search Queries”
August 4, 2011 | Jim Giles, New Scientist

Searches made by millions of internet users are being hijacked and redirected by some internet service providers in the US. Patents filed by Paxfire, the company involved in the hijacking, suggest that it may be part of a larger plan to allow ISPs to generate revenue by tracking the sites their customers visit. It may also be illegal.

"Colour Naming: Eglantine by Any Other Name"
July 6, 2011  |  The Johnson Blog, The Economist

Let's start with the basics. A 1969 study of colour naming by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay concluded that languages evolve through a fairly limited set of possible trajectories for naming colours, determined largely by the biology of the human visual cortex. They begin with a distinction between just two tones, light/warm and dark/cool (there is a disputed claim that the Pirahã language of the Brazilian Amazon hasn't got past this stage).

Researchers analyzing spam operations found that they are run like any other business, albeit an illegal one, and rely on banks' merchant services to function.

“Spam as a Business"
June 9, 2011  |  Bruce Schneier, Schneier on Security

Interesting research: Kirill Levchenko, et al. (2010), "Click Trajectories -- End-to-End Analysis of the Spam Value Chain," IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2011, Oakland, California, 24 May 2011.

“Most Malware Tied to ‘Pay-Per-Install’ Market”
June 9, 2011  |  Brian Krebs, MIT Technology Review

New research suggests that the majority of personal computers infected with malicious software may have arrived at that state thanks to a bustling underground market that matches criminal gangs who pay for malware installations with enterprising hackers looking to sell access to compromised PCs. Pay-per-install (PPI) services are advertised on shadowy underground Web forums. Clients submit their malware—a spambot, fake antivirus software, or password-stealing Trojan—to the PPI service, which in turn charges rates from $7 to $180 per thousand successful installations, depending on the requested geographic location of the desired victims.

“Enterprises Not Ready for IPv6”
June 7, 2011 | Andy Dornan, InformationWeek

On Tuesday night, the world's largest carrier's providers and websites are switching on IPv6, the next-generation Internet protocol that's needed to deal with the looming address shortage. Most enterprise networks aren't ready, according to a survey from trade association CompTIA, which found that only 23% of business IT departments in the U.S. have actually begun to implement the new protocol.

“3 Banks Service Majority of Spam-Driven Sales"
May 25, 2011  |  Mathew J. Schwartz, InformationWeek

The majority of the world's spam-driven sales are serviced by just three banks. That surprise finding comes from a new paper that literally "follows the money" for global spam. The paper, to be delivered at next week's IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2011 in Oakland, Calif., is credited to 15 researchers from four institutions--the University of California at Berkeley, University of California at San Diego, the International Computer Science Institute, and Budapest University of Technology and Economics.

“Battling to Protect Online Privacy and Defeat Spam"
May 25, 2011  |  Tekla Perry, IEEE Spectrum, Tech Talk Blog

Looks like it’s a lot harder to protect privacy than I thought. That’s my impression after spending a day at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, held this week in Berkeley, Calif. I knew privacy protection is not something I can take for granted when using Facebook or Google (more on that coming up in Spectrum’s June special issue on social networks and the Web).

“Secret to Stopping Spam: Follow the Money"
May 23, 2011  |  Larry Greenemeier, Scientific American

Spam comprises upward of 80 percent of incoming e-mail, despite monumental efforts by help desks and security software companies to defeat it. The reason spam volumes continue to grow is that such efforts are often misplaced and fail to hit spammers where it hurts.

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