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Network neighborhood watch
Very rarely do I get the chance to read books that can entice me
strongly enough to take action. The most recent one I read is
Internet Forensics: Using Digital Evidence to Solve Computer
Crime by Robert Jones (ISBN 0-596-10006-X, O’Reilly Media).
The popularity of the Internet has resulted in a sad development
— the proliferation of spam or unsolicited e-mail. Worst, fraud
or misrepresentation is also happening. This is where we receive
e-mails from senders that pretend to be from Citibank, PayPal
and eBay, among others, tricking us to change our password or
update our account information. This is now also referred to as
phishing.
For those of us who know well enough about this, we delete them
right away. However, there are those who open it and fall into
the trap of opening lewd attachments or responding to requests
for more personal information.
As a result, government agencies began receiving complaints from
people who ordered products that never arrived and those about
websites that ceased to exist following certain transactions.
Robert Jones’ book encourages Internet users to take action. It
encourages the building up of communities of people who can be
proactive in detecting spam and fraud and share information to
generate further awareness on these plots to victimize innocent
Internet users.
His book teaches Internet users how to dissect e-mail, websites
and documents to detect spam sources, fraud, spoof or
misrepresentation, among others. To further increase your
knowledge on this subject, there are several websites that one
can refer to, such as the Spamhaus project (http://www.spamhaus.org),
Anti-Phishing Working Group (http://www.antiphishing.org) and
Digital PhishNet (http://www.digitalphishnet.org), among others.
In 2001, I remember becoming a victim of fraud or
misrepresentation. A local Internet user sent me an email
promoting several product lines all being marketed by one
company. This person even sent the e-mail to my own discussion
group where my e-mail address is allowed to post messages
without moderation. After that experience, I had to moderate my
own messages in my forums.
Although this may not necessarily result in Internet users like
us pushing for prosecution, spam senders can be prevented from
doing this to others. They will have to think twice about the
risks they are taking, especially after they are put in a
hotlist.
If a complaint shall be made again regarding a fraud signature
similar to what happened to me, I will not hesitate to cooperate
with the investigation. This is the reason I never deleted the
spoof message in my discussion group. It is being reserved for
that purpose.
Recently, there’s a prominent pseudo hacker who have been
publicly embarrassing various websites with their weaknesses.
However, perhaps their popularity have gotten into their heads
and they started hacking into websites that are direct
competitors of the enterprise that they are working for.
As there’s always a signature or trace of the perpetrator in a
crime scene, the last thing one wants to do is mess around with
a competitor’s Internet servers. They won’t do it for the money
but simply to ruin the reputation of a business competitor,
because its (competitior) unethical (even criminal under the
E-Commerce Law) practices may be worth it.
It is time to take our Internet back. The more vigilant Internet
users will be in combating cybercrime, the less liberty
unscrupulous individuals will have in hurting future generation
of Internet users.
By Janette Toral
Digital Filipino
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