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Welcome to a spamless world?

Posted on 28 Jan 2009 at 16:05

This month, Davey Winder fantasises about killing spam, and pines for some security gadgets he probably won't get for Christmas.

One of the side effects of this activity has been the toppling of the US as "spam capital", the country responsible for originating more spam than any place else on Earth. Following the McColo takedown, it's lost that title to China, according to the monitoring outfit Network Box (which reckons China might have only a short stay at the top and expects servers in Russia to kick in before too long to take control of the botnets...)

Not just spam

Ever wondered just how much the underground economy, the Dark Web - the criminal online marketplace driven by identity-theft, spam and all the rest of it - is actually worth? If you're one of those na?ve types who like to kid themselves that crime doesn't pay, perhaps you should turn the page right now - Symantec has recently released a research paper that suggests that in just 12 months the online criminal fraternity has advertised stolen goods and data to the value of £183 million on those underground servers that it monitors. This value was calculated by looking at how much the advertisers of goods and services would be able to raise if they'd sold everything that they put up for sale, a total of more than 69,000 advertisers posting well over 44 million adverts during the course of just a single year.

The top ten most active advertisers alone accounted for nearly £11 million worth of stolen credit cards and more than £1 million of compromised bank account data. Perhaps the most surprising figure, though, was the one pertaining to just a single advertiser (unlikely to be an individual, and almost certainly acting on behalf of some organised gang or crime syndicate) whose total inventory of stolen data, if fully liquidated, would have been worth a staggering £4.2 billion. That's a lot of stolen credit cards, especially given that the same report reckons that you can snap them up for as little as 7p a piece (with an average credit limit availability of more than £2,500 per card).

Gadgets I wish Santa would bring

Call it wishful thinking, but for once I'd welcome waking up on 25 December with something a little more exciting than a bottle of Jim Beam Black Label and yet another pair of slipper socks (thanks Mum) stuffed into my seasonal stocking. Like all good geeks, what I really want is technology, and like all good security nerds what I really, really want is a self-destructing mobile phone.

Okay, I'll admit that I've accidentally purchased a few of those over the years, but even so I rather like the sound of BackStopp Mobile, which has been developed by a British company called Virtuity. This service will use the mobile networks to locate your lost or stolen handset, no matter where it may be (so long as it's switched on and not being kept inside a lead-lined box in the quiet carriage of a train heading for the Outer Hebrides, of course).

Better yet from my paranoid data-protection perspective, it will automatically delete all the information on your mobile in a secure fashion and send you a report telling what it's wiped, when it wiped it and where exactly the handset was when this wiping took place.

How James Bond is that? Shame that it's a Windows Mobile OS-only device: I guess I'll have to wait to get a self-destructing Nokia N95. The other security gadget I rather wish Santa would bring me comes courtesy of Visa and its credit card with a built-in PIN entry pad, along with a fully self-contained one-time-only security code system that can be used to make internet transactions a whole lot safer. Currently being tested by, I believe, the Bank of America in the UK, the cleverly named Visa PIN Card (can you see what they did there?) has been invented in order to crack down on cardholder-not-present (CNP) frauds.