[LINK] Your money dot con on ABC/RN

[Rick Welykochy]

An excellent 1/2 hr program just went to air on ABC/RN:

http://abc.net.au/rn/backgroundbriefing/stories/2007/1955341.htm

   Your money dot con
   ------------------
   No one's telling how much of our money is being stolen through
   the Internet because no one wants us to lose confidence in the
   system. The banks are making so much money out of it, they prefer
   to wear the costs or push them down to the customer. In the meantime,
   everyone has a story and global criminals are stalking our accounts,
   our phones and our PCs. Reporter: Ian Townsend.


A podcast and transcript will be available soon.

The 80% of the presentation that I did listen to failed to mention
specifically which PC configuration was the source of all the zombies
that is causing this financial fraud epidemic, i.e. PCs running
Microsoft Windows. I have never heard of a Linux or Mac or BSD or
other Unix zombie.

The estimate made in the report is that approx. 50% of all PCs (running
Windows I would conclude) are now owned by the Zombie Lords of the
Underground Criminal Internet - we are talking hundreds of millions
of PCs here. A zombie controller PC was investigated and found to
be controlling about 1,000,000 zombies.

PC users should now be updating their anti-virus databases every 12
hours, installing software security upgrades at least daily and
also learn how to correctly answer the myriad of security questions
they are asked by their PCs in order to secure their systems. I had
to laugh at that conclusion! It ain't gonna happen.

Banks will continue to be mum about online fraud (it is in their
interest to refund the odd complaint and keep their traps shut),
law enforcement officials will continue to pass the buck from one
dept to the next and consumers will continue to run totally insecure
computers on the insecure internet.

California has enacted a law that makes it a crime to fail to
report an online theft, fraud or other criminal activity. Sounds
like a good first step to me.

A great second step would be to make it a criminal offense, actionable
in the civil courts as well, to write and deploy software that lacks
sufficient security provisions to prevent online fraud from happening
in the first place. Call it "duty of software care" legislation.


cheers
rickw




-- 
_________________________________
Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services

Any belief that can't stand up to objective scrutiny is hardly worth having.
      -- LJ McIntyre