Canada ranks second worldwide as top source of malicious Internet activity

Gillian Shaw
Sun

Trusted websites have become the patient zero for some viral epidemics in the virtual world with sophisticated cyber-criminals using them to lure unsuspecting computer users into spreading their malicious code.

And Canada is a key global player in the dark side of the Internet, now ranking second worldwide after Israel as the top source of malicious Internet activity.

These are among the findings of Symantec’s Internet Security Threat Report Trends for the first six months of this year, released today.

“The Web is becoming patient zero for infections and we are now faced with situations where even the guys you would normally trust have an issue,” said Dean Turner, director of Symantec’s global intelligence networks. “The Web has really become the focal point.

“Instead of the bad guys going to you, you are going to them.”

The threat comes from the increasing number of trusted websites being hacked by the professional criminals who have sophisticated commercial tools that allow them to operate vast networks of infected computers.

Even government websites are not immune from the hackers.

“What we found was that governments are the targets and the victims of the same thing as enterprises are when it comes to hosting phishing sites,” said Turner.

Phishing is a technique used by cyber-criminals to acquire sensitive personal data such as credit- card and banking information.

Turner said 23 per cent of all government websites hosting phishing sites were on government domains in Thailand. And the study found that four per cent of all malicious activity detected during the first six month of 2007 originated from Internet Protocol space registered with Fortune 100 companies.

“Fortune 100 companies control seven per cent of all IP space worldwide, so it is pretty significant when we see that activity coming from the Fortune 100 – that’s a lot of IP space.”

Turner said that figure is likely explained by criminals capitalizing on the unused IP space of the companies.

“The bad guys know,” he said. “If they are looking for activity on this IP space and they are not seeing any, they know it is fertile ground.”

Turner said Canadians spend the most time online of any computer users in the world, a trend he said could explain this country’s high ranking in malicious Internet activity.

Among other findings of the report:

– Bot networks, networks of infected computers that are controlled by criminals, have a lifespan of 19 days in Canada, the longest lifespan of bot networks anywhere in the world.

– The U.S. was the target of the most denial of service (DOS) attacks, accounting for 61 per cent of all such attacks worldwide in the first half of this year.

– The U.S. also was the top country of origin for attack, accounting for 25 per cent of all global attacks.

– The education sector topped all sectors for data breaches that could lead to identity theft, accounting for 30 per cent of all such data breaches over the first six months of 2007.

– The theft or loss of computer or other data-storage medium made up 46 percent of all data breaches that could lead to identity theft in the first half of this year.

– Credit cards, at 22 per cent of all items, were the most common commodity listed in the underground economy and 85 per cent of the cards being sold were issued by banks in the U.S.

© The Vancouver Sun 2007

 

ROB PEGORARO
Province

WASHINGTON POST

Microsoft Office is as much a part of the workplace as drawn-out meetings and bad coffee. But Microsoft’s combination of Word, Excel and PowerPoint is not the only way to write, crunch numbers or prepare slideshows. And for home users, it isn’t even the best way any more.

The newest non-Microsoft options look better in part because they no longer try to mimic the bloated, pricey Office, which costs $150 US for homes, $400 US and up for businesses.

For years, Office rivals tried to match Office feature for feature in the hope that nobody would find anything missing. Corel’s WordPerfect Office and the free OpenOffice.org accurately emulate the Office experience, but they haven’t made things much easier.

A few new competitors are taking a different approach, providing only the features most users are likely to use. They can’t replace Office in every office but can stand in for it in many homes.

Two of these Office alternatives are free websites that you can use in any new browser: Google Documents and Zoho Office.

The other, Apple’s $79, Mac-only iWork ’08, is a traditional program that incorporates some refreshing changes to the standard productivity bundle.

Google and Zoho’s chief advantage is not making you install anything to get started: Visit docs.google.com or zoho.com, log into your account and you’ll see a page that works shockingly like a traditional program. You can select commands off menus and drag and drop text and numbers, without any wait for parts of the page to reload or redraw.

Google provides only a word processor and a spreadsheet, though it is working on a presentation program, while Zoho offers all three types of applications. These programs leave out some features needed by more advanced users of Word, Excel or PowerPoint, such as footnotes. Forget writing an academic paper with them, but you’d be fine jotting down a letter or calculating the costs of a new loan.

On the other hand, Google and Zoho provide a feature that Microsoft Office users can only get if they work in an office running Microsoft’s server software — they let you invite other people to comment on and edit your documents from within their own web browsers.

Both these programs can save your work as Microsoft Office-compatible files, but you may never need to bother with that, when sharing it on the Web is so simple.

Google and Zoho need a broadband connection to work well, but Zoho can also function without any Internet connection if you first install extra software called Google Gears. This offline mode only lets you read your Zoho word-processing documents. This Pleasanton, Calif., company says it will soon let users edit work offline as well, making this Web application usable on a plane and other places beyond Internet reach.

Compared with the wizardry of Google and Zoho, Apple’s iWork ’08 can seem much less interesting. But the Pages word processor, Numbers spreadsheet and Keynote presentation programs in this bundle bring notable improvements.

iWorks outdoes Microsoft Office most notably by helping you make more use of the information already on your computer. Apple has also made these features easier to discover than the tools in Microsoft Office, thanks to a set of prefab templates ready to be filled with your data.

iWork’s Numbers program is the most fascinating part of this bundle. There hasn’t been a new spreadsheet program in years, much less one that could be described as “fascinating.” Numbers ditches the traditional, intimidating graph-paper look and instead invites you to mix multiple tables, slick 3-D charts and graphics on a single page.