Monday, October 1, 2001

Warding off cyberterrorist attacks Internet experts believe that the threat of cyber-attacks are increasing, though not necessarily from Osama bin Laden's AlQaida network, which seems focused on destroying physical targets and killing civilians. Georgetown University computer science professor Dorothy Denning says, "It's my understanding that they're not teaching this in the terrorist-training camps," but rather that the danger comes from "these thousands of affiliates or sympathizers." Stephen Northcutt, who runs an information warfare simulation for the SANS Institute, warns that terrorist could "potentially paralyze commerce" and might be able to "accomplish a cascading failure of the electronic grid." (*San Jose Mercury News*, 1 Oct 2001; NewsScan Daily, 1 October 2001; http://www.siliconvalley.com/docs/news/depth/cyber100101.htm) [Also, there is clearly renewed interest in off-site backup data storage. PGN] ["NewsScan" via risks-digest Volume 21, Issue 67] 0:00 # G!

U.S. court shuts down deceptive Web sites Reuters reports that the U.S. District Court in Philadelphia has ordered John Zuccarina to shut down sites operated by him. The Federal Trade Commission filed a complaint against Zuccarina, claiming that he has purchased domain names which are misspellings or other "one-offs" of popular sites, which he uses to "blitz" unsuspecting visitors with pop-up ads, from which the user cannot escape, in order to receive advertising revenue (estimated between $800K and $1 million). Zuccarina has registered some 5500 domains, including www.annakurnikova.com, 41 variants of "Britney Spears", and others. http://www0.mercurycenter.com/breaking/docs/081329.htm [griffith@olagrande.net via risks-digest Volume 21, Issue 67] 0:00 # G!