December 17, 2004
Dear Subscribers:
Happy holidays to all of our readers! The newsletter will be on holiday break through New Year's. The next issue will arrive in your in-box 1/7. Meanwhile, check my blog for kid-tech news as it breaks. Here's the lineup for this second week of December:
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Family Tech: To foil phishers
Have you gotten an email from PayPal, eBay, Citibank,
or even your own bank lately? Did it say something unnerving about a certain
amount having been removed from your account, or you can't use your account
until you update it - "click here to update"? Chances are, it's a phishing
scam.
The number of phishing emails that have been intercepted
by MessageLabs (a large email security company serving businesses) increased
10-fold this past year - from 337,000 in January to 4.5 million last month,
reported ZDNET
UK.
Which means a growing number have been arriving in
our families' PC in-box(es). The new news on this affects families
even more: Now we and our Web-researcher kids can stumble on phishing sites
just by using Google and other search engines, CNET
reports. Phishers are "setting up legitimate looking e-commerce sites
that disguise links to malicious software as pictures of goods on sale." You
might see an instruction like, "Click here to download a picture" of the product,
cartoon character, person, etc., and you'd be downloading malicious software
that might log keystrokes (when typing in a password or credit card or social
security number) or take control of your computer.
Fortunately, anti-phishing software products are emerging.
I recently interviewed Jeffrey Hellman, president of the company that makes
a simple anti-phishing toolbar called FraudEliminator
that's free. [Please note: We spotlight online-safety options for readers
when they're timely but do not have the resources to test software properly.]
One of the things I like most about this one is that,
as Jeff put it, FraudEliminator's designer "set out to design a product that
would keep his grandmother safe." Using it is not rocket science, it's perfect
for the not-so-tech-literate or anybody who worries about online privacy or
(like all of us) is tempted to click when email says someone's been accessing
their bank account and they need to verify their ID!
If you do click to "PayPal" or whatever, a big warning
box pops up and tells you it's actually a suspicious site based in Korea or
Vanuatu (you choose whether or not to continue on to that site). The warning
can be annoying, too, but the pluses might outpace the minuses when young
Web researchers start clicking on faux "images" and downloading malicious
software in sites they found in a search engine.
The toolbar on your PC "talks" to the FraudEliminator
server, which updates its black list of scam sites every 15 minutes. How it
"knows" a site's fraudulent and updates the black list is pretty interesting,
but I won't bore you with too much detail. First, it uses artificial intelligence,
the company says, to "recognize" key words and phrases that suggest fraud.
It can also tell if the site you're clicking to is a real domain name (like
Citibank.com) or an IP address (a bunch of numbers); phishers' sites' addresses
are more likely to be numbers only (an IP address is cheaper and quicker to
be put up and abandoned). When a suspicious site is detected, a report goes
from your PC to FraudEliminator headquarters. FE also has various "honeypot"
email addresses scattered around the world, attracting spam and phishing emails,
Jeff Hellman said. "In these honeypot accounts, we regularly receive up to
dozens of phishing scams on a daily basis. These are reviewed and blacklisted"
for the next update on users' PCs. FraudEliminator is not the only anti-phishing
tool (see the links below for others) and it's probably not for the truly
tech-savvy, but it's available, free, and easy to use - not much downside
for families of varying age levels and degrees of tech expertise.
Further phishing news
- Other tools. A new browser called DeepNet
Explorer (based on Internet Explorer) has anti-phishing detection and blocks
a new kind of pop-up ad that evades pop-up blockers, CNET
reports. Here's what
it looks like (not wholly unlike FraudEliminator). Other anti-phishing
tools and services include Phish
Net and CloudMark
SafetyBar (only works with Outlook and protects against phishing emails)
and free protection provided by some Internet service providers and eBay.
"Companies that offer anti-phishing products include EarthLink, Webroot
Software and PostX," ZDNET
UK reported last summer. "Microsoft and Yahoo are also working on such
programs." More certainly are in the works, but the free-FraudEliminator-toolbar
concept makes the most sense to me so far.
- How to spot phish. In a 12/7 entry of his
blog,
ZDNET's Brian Cooley tells exactly how to spot these online scams: "Just
hover your mouse over the link in the e-mail. After a second or two, your
browser or email software will pop up a little balloon that will show you
the real link you'd be clicking. It will be patently bogus. For example,
[an email] supposedly from Washington Mutual Bank asking me to update my
account (which doesn't exist) via this link: https://login.personal.wamu.com/logon/logon.asp?dd=1.
It actually goes to: http://washington02.netfirms.com/login.personal.wamu.com/internetBanking.secureApp/.
[Netfirms.com] is where you'll be taken if you click ... a company that
hosts small Web sites and, apparently, criminals as well. The next part
in italics looks legit but is just window dressing ... not a link to Washington
Mutual at all."
- Anti-phish groups. Solid information on phishing
can be found at the Anti-Phishing
Working Group's site. And a new anti-phishing alliance, Digital PhishNet,
launched last week, ComputerWorld
reported. Among its members: Microsoft, America Online, VeriSign, EarthLink,
the FBI, US Secret Service and Postal Inspection Service, and "9 of the
top 10 US banks and financial service companies."
- Latest scam: Phishers changing the content
of a pop-up window in a legitimate banking site to malicious content that
captures personal info you type in, thinking it's your bank site's own pop-up
- ZDNET
reports. (FraudEliminator's Jeff Hellman says FE catches exploits like
this.)
- Latest data: The number of phishing sites
"associated with online identity theft scams" grew by 33% last month, PCWorld
reported Wednesday. The most common pretended to be eBay and Citibank.
* * * *
Web News Briefs
- Watch out: Xmas-greeting worm
Tell your kids to be careful about opening any
email that looks like a holiday greeting, even if it appears to be from
a friend. It could well be the Zafi worm-carrying one that's going around
the Net globally, CNET
reports. It's "spoofing" email addresses in people's address books,
so it could be coming from a friend or relative's infected PC. PCWorld
world reports that, "in addition to the Christmas well wishes in the subject
line, Zafi-generated emails contain the message 'Happy Hollydays' and
are signed "Jaime'." What it does to PCs is shut down the anti-virus software
on them, in addition to harvesting email addresses and sending itself
to them. Home users with Windows PCs are most vulnerable, CNET added.
- P2P ethics in school
With little kids who've never known life without
the Internet, the ethic somehow came to be something like: if you can
get it on the Net, it must be ok to have. That's why the media industry
is taking file-sharing ethics ed to younger and younger children. Elementary
schools in the Washington, D.C., area are inviting AOL's SafetyBot, a
5-foot-tall robot into classrooms to explain to 4th-, 5th-, and 6th-graders
why it's illegal to download music, movies, and software from the Internet.
According to the Washington
Post, "the industry's approach is two-pronged: to terrify and to teach."
The "terrify" part is where it's explained to the kids that they're not
anonymous when their stealing movies, music, and software; they can be
caught." Last month, the Motion Picture Association announced that it
would begin suing those who download, one by one, to scare file-sharers
away from the practice many believe has taken a chunk out of industry
revenue in recent years," the Post reports. "With this, the movie industry
followed the lead of the Recording Industry Association of America, which
started its first lawsuits in fall 2003." (The RIAA announced today that
it was suing 754 more file-sharers, taking the total number of lawsuits
past the 7,000 mark, Reuters
reports).
Older student perspectives on file-sharing
can be found in a recent article the news site of California State University,
Chico, "Right,
wrong? Good, evil? Who cares?", which points to FreeCulture.org, "founded
by the student who sued diebold" (see Mother
Jones) and probably a little to the left of Stanford Professor Lawrence
Lessig's Creative Commons (but
fans of it).
- Good news for young researchers
And everyone else - maybe including parents, teachers,
and librarians who worry that students have forgotten about libraries
and media other than the Web! At least there will be more good material
to find on the Web, with Google's announcement today. Google is adding
some of the world's best libraries to its database, bringing them "to
life online," as CNET
put it. "Google itself was born out of a library digitization project
at Stanford," CNET reported, "and its founders had planned all along to
build a vast searchable index of books." Now it has the technology and
the resources, the company told CNET. It has already reached agreements
of various sorts to digitize at least out-of-print and copyrighted works
in the collections of Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford Universities' libraries,
as well as that of the University of Michigan (all of its 7.4 million
volumes, as well as Stanford's), and the New York Public Library. Google
is underwriting the cost of digitizing the books at each library, and
they will be searchable exclusively at Google. This is in addition to
the launch of Google Scholar,
for searching academic papers online (here's an in-depth view of Scholar
at Infotoday).
[Google's search competitors, Yahoo, MSN, and Amazon, with it's new A9,
are hard at work upgrading their databases too, CNET adds.]
The sooner the better, many educators say, according
to the Associated
Press, citing one student - after being told some sourcing for a paper
needed to be from books - asking a Georgia Tech professor where one could
find a book. "It's a paradox to some that so many young Americans can
be so accepting of online information whose origin is unclear," the AP
reports. Books in Google's database will be clearly labeled as such. This
is the tech story of the week so far, arguably of 2004. The New
York Times had a great piece offering libraries' perspective on e-books.
And here's the BBC's
coverage and the Washington Post's round-up, "Google
- 21st Century Dewey Decimal System", which - the Post adds - "raises
big questions about whether a for-profit company should become a gatekeeper
to such vast storehouses of knowledge."
- Communicating young Canadians
Now there's a twist: Canada's youth are "less
active online than adults," ClickZ
Network reports. Canadians 12-17 spend almost a third (27.8%) less
time online than adults (13 hours/week vs. 18 hours/wk, on average), with
their Internet behavior largely confined to social activities, according
to a survey by market researchers Ipsos-Reid. The latter half of that
sentence is less a surprise. Seventy-three percent of teens use email,
70% do instant-messaging, 49% use the Web for school research, and then
the figures plummet to only 29% downloading music and go down from there.
"Only 17% of teenagers reported having ever purchased something online,
versus 50% of the adult online population." Parents, note the numbers
that spark online-safety concerns related to all that online communication:
"About 14% of teens reported that they had been asked at least once to
meet in person with someone they originally met online. That number increases
to 20% among respondents between ages 15 and 17, according to the survey."
- Net crimes against kids: UK study
The victimization of online kids figured prominently
in the findings of a recent British Home Office survey on Internet crime.
The survey, of "53 Internet and technology experts" looked specifically
at "criminal threats posed by new technology," The
Scotsman recently reported. From the perspective of these tech professionals,
7 of the 10 "most serious Net crime threats" were related to pedophilia
and child-porn. For example, "increased grooming [of children by online
pedophiles] and possible stalking across the Net" led the list. Three
others among the 10 crimes were "increased access to pedophile content
[child porn] sold by organized criminals ... online"; "use of online storage
for pedophile images to bypass seizure of home computers"; and "use of
secure 'peer to peer' [file-sharing] technology for all types of pedophile
activity."
The goods news is, the European Union recently
announced a 45 million euro ($60m), multi-year program to help protect
online kids, Reuters
reports. The program follows a "38m euro ($51m) project "that led
to the creation of 'hotlines' where parents could report illegal [child
pornography] found on the Internet. It will increase the number of hotlines,
finance technology to filter out pornography, and raise awareness among
parents and children." According to EC figures, "around 60% of children
regularly surf the Internet in Scandinavia and countries such as Britain,
the Netherlands, Estonia, and the Czech Republic."
- Parents & video games
"It may be a game, but it's not necessarily for
children" is the basic message British officials and media specialists
are sending. It's also a message that people who know video games feel
is not getting through to parents on both sides of the Atlantic. This
week, British government officials, video game industry representatives
and the British Board of Film Classification met to discuss "concerns
that children may be playing games aimed at adults which include high
levels of violence, the BBC
reports. "In 2003, Britons spent £1,152 million [$2.2 billion] on
games, more than ever before. And this Christmas, parents are expected
to spend millions on video games and consoles." For US news on the video-game
front, see "Check out
the game ratings!", "Kid-tested,
parent-approved games," and "10
worst video games."
In the US, a few days later, Katie Hafner of the
New York Times writes on the very same issue in "Game
Ratings: U is for Unheeded." Leading with a woman buying "Grand Theft
Auto" (rated M) for a 10-year-old who very much covets it. "While many
parents would not think of taking a 10-year-old child to see a film rated
for mature audiences, young children routinely wander into the domain
of mature games," Katie writes. One of her sources suggests that parents
act on film ratings more than gaming ratings, for some reason (do you?).
Also, "to some extent, the problem lies with the fact that few parents
sit and play video games with their children." Meanwhile, the governor
of Illinois wants his state to make it illegal to sell games rated M to
minors, the Washington
Post reported Thursday We'd love to hear
from you on any/all of this!.
- Help in reporting child porn
I hope the need to report child pornography never
arises at your house. But if anyone in your family uses a file-sharing
service such as Grokster, Morpheus, Kazaa, or BiTTorrent, it could happen,
because illegal child porn is traded on P2P networks. [See "Porn exceeds
music in online file-sharing" in my 3/21/03
issue, referring to an '03 study of what people were searching for
on the Gnutella-based P2P networks (42% for porn, 38% for music, 6% for
illegal child porn).] We've known about the porn risk in file-sharing
for some time, but it was confirmed once again today, when a file-sharing
trade association announced the launch of P2P
Patrol, a Web page with instructions on what to do if you inadvertently
download child porn images while file-sharing and how to report it, CNET
reports. Please note what P2P Patrol says about deleting and not forwarding
any child porn images, because possession and distribution are illegal
in the US and many countries. The page explains how to permanently delete
it while providing sufficient evidence to the National Center for Missing
& Exploited Children's CyberTipline.com, other hotlines, or law enforcement
agencies. For on P2P risks, see "File-sharing realities for families,"
5/28/04.
- IM-ing in Arizona
Teenagers' avid instant-messaging is still news
in a lot of local papers - and maybe even to some parents. In the East
Valley Tribune, a Phoenix-area paper, the lead sentence went, "When
East Valley teens have something to say, an increasing number put it in
writing with instant messaging." The writer adds that IM-ers "write about
sex, drugs, homework, parents or even the weather" and even threaten each
other in this medium. I suspect this is news more to newspaper people
than to parents, but I would like to get your opinion on this - do you
feel parents in your community have a handle on what's being talked about
among teenaged IM-ers? Email me anytime via anne@netfamilynews.org. [For
more on the IM part of parenting and educating young people, see my series
on "The IM life of middle-schoolers" - the home
front, a school's
role, and home
tech options.]
- Tracking teens driving
With GPS (global positioning system), that is.
It tells parents how fast their kids are driving, notifying parents when
a predetermined speed level is passed, the Associated
Press reports. The idea is to get kids to carry a cell phone that
contains a GPS chip that "sends out regular signals letting parents know
where they are and how fast they're going." An alarm goes off in the kid's
phone and a signal is sent to Mom or Dad when the family-set speed limit
is reached. The organization behind it is "Teen
Arrive Alive," and Gen. Tommy Franks just signed on as spokesman.
* * * *
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That does it for this week. Have a great weekend!
Sincerely,
Anne Collier, Editor
Net Family News
