Holiday season is in full swing, and millions of Kazakhs are busy preparing for their early departure. Kaspersky Lab has decided to create a kind of “cyberportraits” of most favorite countries of Kazakh tourists in terms of their information security.

According to data published by the Information-Analytical Center of the insurance company «Kompetenz», 53% of adults living in the northern and southern capitals do not plan to take a vacation this summer, 29% are going to take, 18% of respondents have not made their decision yet. Of those respondents who are going to take a vacation 9% are going to go abroad. Among foreign resorts Turkey is the most popular tourist destination this year. According to IAC IC «Kompetenz» statistics the beaches of Italy, Spain, Greece and Bulgaria are also quite popular among Kazakh tourists this summer.

According to the statistics of the cloud infrastructure shown by Kaspersky Security Network these countries are distinguished not only by climate and natural landscape, but by the landscape of cyber threats, too. Tourists going to Turkey for a holiday are at the greatest risk to dampen their vacation with unpleasant cyber incidents. According to the data given by Kaspersky Lab in the first half of 2014 34% of users faced cyber threats while they were in Turkey, where one of them had an average of 13 information security incidents. Spain, which attracts a lot of Kazakh tourists, has exactly identical figure, but there was one user threatened by an average of 10 cases to be exposed by malware.

Mobile devices, which users take with them everywhere and often use to communicate with family and friends or search for tourist information, are at greater risk when people are on holiday. Generally, smartphones and tablets contain a lot of personal data and the transmission of them in the wrong hands is not exactly the part of the owner’s plan. However, it is not a secret that a small device can be easily lost, and may fall into fraudsters hands who, unfortunately, are particularly active in the resort areas.

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that today, more and more citizens of Kazakhstan are using their smartphones and tablets to make purchases on the Internet or manage their online bank account. Only in the second quarter of 2014 Kaspersky Lab experts  found 2,033 mobile banking Trojans, and since the beginning of 2014 the total number of banking Trojans for mobile devices has increased by almost 4 times. In case of penetration of any malicious programs on these devices, a user’s holiday can be at the risk of being spoiled, and being among nimble-fingered pickpockets their e-wallet will face no less danger than the real one. In the segment of malware for mobile devices new trends appeared over the past year. One of them was the explosive growth in the number of mobile applications for stealing money from bank accounts: collection of samples of such programs collected by Kaspersky Lab has increased by almost twenty times for the year. The vast majority of attacks were aimed at smartphone owners on the Android platform.

“It is very easy to get carried away with new impressions, lose vigilance and generally quick to forget about all the problems and dangers when you are on holiday. However, intruders and computer threats do not rest. Therefore, we recommend users to keep an eye out all the time, wherever they went. It is not necessary to enter personal data like mail password, credit card number, date of birth, and similar information if you are using free unsecured Wi-Fi network. In our experience, non-secure connection to the Internet allows attackers to intercept all the data easily,” says Yuri Regents, anti-virus expert from Kaspersky Lab. “It is better to install a special security solution for your device you can go on holiday with – that is when you can really relax.”

Source: Kaspersky Lab

14-year-old Trisha Prabhu plans to eventually major in neuroscience, but first she wants to solve cyberbullying. Selected as a global finalist for the Google Science Fair 2014, her Rethink project pivots around a simple concept: getting teenagers to reread hurtful messages before sending them out into the digital ether.

Prabhu hypothesized that adolescents might be less willing to troll others if an alert mechanism is in effect. To determine the veracity of her theory, she created the “Baseline” and the “Rethink” systems, both of which ask users if they’re willing to post a series of pre-determined messages online. The difference between the two is that the latter will also warn of potential offensiveness and offer the opportunity to reconsider. Prabhu then conducted a total of 1,500 anonymous trials with teenagers ranging from ages 12 to 18. After tabulating the results, she discovered that 67 percent of those utilizing the “Baseline” system were ready to publish malicious remarks. In contrast, less than five percent of participants from the “Rethink” test group reported the same.

The young scientist is now working on a prototype to demonstrate how the “Rethink” system can be integrated with today’s plethora of social media sites. “My design includes a sophisticated context-sensitive filtering system that catches truly ‘mean/hurtful’ messages,” Prabhu writes in her project outline.

Source: The Verge

Just like Microsoft and Google, Facebook is actively looking for explicit photos of children.

Facebook scans users’ pictures for this content when they upload a photo to Facebook or Instagram, using the same tool invented by Microsoft that both Microsoft and Google use, a spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider.

“There is no place for child exploitative content on Facebook. We use PhotoDNA to check that each image which is uploaded to our site is not a known child abuse image. If a match is found then we prevent the image being uploaded to Facebook, disable the account, and flag it to NCMEC for investigation,” said the spokesperson

While we haven’t heard of any arrests coming from Facebook tipping off the authorities, we know that this is entirely possible. As we’ve previously reported, if an online service provider discovers this material on their network, they are legally obligated to report it to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), who reviews the material and reports as necessary to law enforcement.

They are not under legal obligation to look for the material, a legal expert tells us, but the online service providers have taken it upon themselves to do that.

In fact, it is so illegal to possess these images that online service providers do not even keep copies of the NCMEC’s database themselves, a source close to Facebook tells us. The technology invented by Microsoft allows them to detect the pictures by looking for what’s known as hashtags, special digital fingerprints that indicates the picture has been labeled as illegal. In fact, it is those tags that they are looking for. So, there’s almost no possibility of making a mistake.

Facebook’s terms of service don’t spell out that it’s scanning photos in this way, but it does clearly warn people: ”You will not post content that: is hate speech, threatening, or pornographic; incites violence; or contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence.”

Privacy advocates remain concerned that one day service providers could abuse this ability to scan our emails, cloud services, and images.

Source: Business Insider

On a tip-off from Microsoft, a Pennsylvanian resident was arrested on 31 July for keeping child pornography on his Internet accounts.

The company alerted the police, after discovering that an image involving an underage girl had been allegedly saved to the man’s OneDrive cloud storage account.

According to court documents, the man was subsequently detected trying to send two illegal pictures via one of Microsoft’s live.com email accounts.

Microsoft’s terms and conditions for its US users explicitly state that it has the right to deploy “automated technologies to detect child pornography or abusive behaviour that might harm the system, our customers, or others”.

Source: газета.ru

Online anonymity is a beautiful, terrible thing, so naturally governments and law enforcement types are eager to see what happens behind the web’s closed doors. Naturally, that includes the folks at the FBI: According to Wired, the FBI has been using “network investigative techniques” — like highly specific, purpose-built malware — to help peel back popular anonymizing service Tor’s layers of obscurity to catch criminals.

The bureau’s efforts began in earnest with an involved child pornography investigation dubbed Operation Torpedo back in 2012. They eventually lucked out by gaining access to a CP site called Pedoboard, arresting the operator, taking over the servers, and delivering malware to visitors who thought they were protected by Tor.

There’s no denying that some good has come from the bureau’s use of malware, as Wired’s Kevin Poulsen points out that more than 12 child porn aficionados are headed to trial as a result. The flip side of that coin is that the FBI’s success with Operation Torpedo led to another effort to bypass the anonymity that Tor provides… and possibly exposed some innocent people’s information to the FBI’s eager eyes. With a little Javascript, understanding of Firefox and Tor security issues and a “tiny” Windows program, users of some Tor-hidden services like Tormail (hosted by an outfit called Freedom Hosting, which itself was being investigated for “tolerating” child porn) essentially had their IP addresses unmasked.

Source: engadget

The UN Human Rights experts have prepared a report on the right to privacy in the digital age. It says that mass surveillance by governments is a violation of freedoms, including the right to privacy. However, the all-seeing deity of special services is not the only thing internet users should think about. Permanently being “online” involves a lot of risks that most people still have not totally realized. Of course, children are the most vulnerable on the Internet. According to the representative of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) Carl Lichchiardelo, cyber-bullying, aggression, identity theft, violation of the right to privacy, sexting, pornography are online risks that children are not prepared for. 

Nowadays, children start using the Internet at an early age – since they are 5-6-years-old. According to the results of studies almost half of the European children can go on-line in their rooms, and a quarter of children aged 12 to 15 have their own tablets, not to mention mobile phones.

The majority of students do not even have the slightest idea about how to protect their information, to restrict access to their pages on social networks, and more than that, not even suspect that such a need exists. Experts report that this situation is more common in developing countries:

“Many developed countries already have the infrastructure that allows to restrict digital risks for children, while in developing countries it does not exist. On the other hand, children living in developing countries do not have access to the big quantity of electronic devices. However, they can use the network in public places, in an internet cafe for free.”

Parents are primarily responsible for the safety of their children on the World Wide Web. However, according to the statistics, there is an interesting contradiction. 92% of parents claim that they have established clear rules of online children behavior, whereas 34% of children report that parents have established no rules.

And it is true that most parents do not even realize what their children do on the Internet and they should not be criticized because most of them simply do not have time for doing this. According to specialists, it would not also be pedagogically to create the system of a total children control. Especially, taking into account that technological solutions – such as the use of special filters on computers – are not always effective.

Sometimes it is much more important to explain a child what risks are connected with the use of the Internet, why there is a need for the protection of personal data and what consequences may entail while visiting websites with questionable content. According to Carl Lichchiardelo, if parents do not explain their children which risks they can face on the Internet they can always go to, for example, their classmates and there they can still encounter the same problems.

The International Telecommunication Union talk about the need for training and support for parents and teachers – particularly in the framework of the ITU Child Online Protection initiatives. After all, the digital disjuncture between generations is very large. Sometimes it is difficult for adults to talk about the Internet and technology to children who have learned to use smartphones earlier than writing.

Source: Радио ООН

“Houston police have arrested a registered sex offender after Google tipped them off to illegal photos of children in his Gmail account,” Engadget reported .

Google has long used automatic image scanning to fight online child exploitation, but it’s now clear that this monitoring applies to email, too.

The bust is notable in that there were no public clues to the offender’s activity, such as a website; besides the people he contacted, only Google would have known what he was doing online. It was not known until now if Google checks users’ Gmail images. However this news has not surprised anyone: the user agreement now states that Google analyzes the contents of the mailbox, not only for the selection of content, but also for safety reasons.

Source: газета.ru

A U.S. Federal court in New York ruled July 31 that Microsoft must turn over customers’ information to U.S. authorities. Now, Microsoft is required to give personal information, such as e-mails of their customers, regardless of the server location.

The corporation tried to challenge in court the obligation to transmit to the authorities data of foreign clients as prescribed by the competent authorities. The immediate reason for the complaint was the demand of the American Prosecutor’s Office to access the data of the European data center in Dublin, where user-level data from Russia is also processed. Prosecutor demanded access to the servers of Ireland in the criminal case about drugs.

The judgment states that it is about the control of information, and not about its location. At the same time, the court suspended its order to give Microsoft time to appeal.

Source: ruformator.ru

Nowadays it seems impossible to talk about online drug-trafficking within any country, as the system of illegal transactions has already acquired global scale. As a result, there were established different structures in different countries which were capable to stand against the online drug-trafficking.

Dipartimento Politiche Antidroga (Dpa) – Department of Antidrug Policy, which is the part of the Council of Ministers, was created for this purpose in Italy. Dpa has its own webpages on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, as well as nearly 20 websites which give information about the danger of drugs and promote healthy lifestyle. The National Early Warning System, created in the framework of Dpa, carries on the monitoring of websites containing propaganda, advertising and offering narcotic drugs.

Dpa collaborates with NAS (Italian Carabinieri) and AIFA ( The Italian Medicines Agency). Dpa with NAS and AIFA identify and close websites that offer narcotic drugs, and providers then are obliged to block access to these sites.

Since 2011 the National Early Warning System of Dpa has been monitoring the websites that distribute drugs online. According to Dpa, since then there were identified about 500 sites that conducted drug trafficking. 64% of them were closed, while hosting providers of other websites just deleted the offers.

With the help of monitoring system, Dpa defines new directions in the production, supply and consumption of drugs, as well as “taste” of consumers. According to Dpa, that helps them in taking preventive measures and assisting the police in conducting raids.

Together with Italian parents’ associations (AGE и MOIGE), Dpa has developed a special application for computers, smartphones and tablets, that prohibits the access to sites with suspicious content with the mention of drugs and medicines. The program is designed to protect children and young people from similar online resources. This service is regularly updated, up-loading “black list” of the National Early Warning System. When you try to go to the unreliable site, link is redirected to parents, the entrance to the site for the child device is locked.

At the end of May 2014 Dpa introduced a new system for monitoring the Internet in order to identify new drugs, their distribution and delivery via postal services, which was highly appreciated by Europol in the fight against drug trafficking, weapons and child pornography.

Source: rspectr.com

The UK residents massively refuse to install filters that eliminate adult content. According to experts, this is due to the fact that the British want to watch porn on the Internet.

The four largest Internet service providers in the United Kingdom – Virgin Media, British Telekom, Sky and TalkTalk – offered all their new users a pilot service: compulsory filtering of websites with “18 +” content , and not only at the user level but also at the level of the provider. It happened in July 2013 after the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom David Cameron announced that the government came to an agreement with service providers to introduce this feature.

And this week the British media process controller Ofcom summarized the first results of this experiment: every seventh resident agreed to filter traffic.

The overall picture on the largest British providers is as follows: 5% of new British Telecom users, 8% of new Sky users, 36% of new TalkTalk user and only 4% of new Virgin Media users agreed to filter traffic.

It must be noted that forced filtration was proposed to only 35% of new Virgin Media users.

TalkTalk is knocked out of the picture, and this is due to the fact that its Internet filter has been available to customers since May 2011. British Telecom and Sky offered the function at the end of 2013. Virgin Media introduced its filter only in February 2014, in violation of the terms established by the British authorities.

As for Russian private users, they are free to visit websites that contain adult content, and parents decide themselves to install Internet filters on children computers or not.

“According to the data given by Kaspersky Lab, more than 50% of children in Russia freely visit different websites,” reports Safe Internet League CEO Denis Davydov. At the same time, every fourth child faces an online manifestation of cruelty and aggression. “And what especially dangerous is that only 39% of children turn to their parents for help, when they face unpleasant situations on the Internet,” – said Davydov.

According to the Safe Internet League, nowadays only 12.8% of parents use content filters on their computers. “In fact, the level of Internet literacy of parents is not sufficient to distinguish between harmful and safe information for children, as well as to choose the right way to protect children from harmful content” – added Davydov.

Denis Davydov supposed that the skeptical attitude of users to the idea of pre-filtration is connected with distrust of those procedures that will be used to filter content. ”People are afraid that content filtering is going to be rough and excessive and that they won’t be able to get some important information from search services. But these are the fears of ordinary people caused due to their lack of knowledge about the pre-filtration procedures. Thus each user must have right to refuse this service,” he said.

It is interesting that in January 2014 many foreign experts expressed skepticism about the idea of ​​content filtering for child protection. The head of the Free Speech Coalition (FSC) Diane Duke criticized the initiative of the British Prime Minister on the pages of The Telegraph.

According to her, even though these filters help children to be protected from the information that it is too early for them to know, but they cannot protect children from the real online dangers, and filters of the providers create dangerous illusion of child protection on the Internet. “The real online dangers like cyber threats, proxy servers, p2p-systems are not controlled by these filters,” said Duke.

“It can be difficult to find common ground with technologies but basically the education of children is the hardest work. And if you want to have children, the interaction with the dangers which the society creates for them is one of the nowadays conditions,” the expert added.

Source: газета.ru