"I know I have done something very wrong"

Convicted cyberthief Jason Smathers told U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein of his culpability in a dramatic case involving the theft of 92 million AOL screen names. "I know I have done something very wrong" were the words of the 25 year old who has no doubt caused untold misery to countless users and parents victimized by pornography and other unwelcome items in their inboxes. Amazingly, he only faced 24 months under the law (hello? come again?), and the judge gave him a relatively mild 15 months in the slammer. SPN hopes that stricter penalties will be passed by lawmakers in the future.

Low Worm Infection Rates - The Calm Before the Storm?

Although the latest round of worms released to attack a vulnerability in Windows 2000 appears to have done less damage than previous attacks, there is small comfort in that observation. A worm attack at Memorial Healthcare Systems in Hollywood, FL caused the breakdown of over 2,000 workstations throughout the 5-hospital network due to fatal errors. The worm may have entered the network from a PDA (personal digital assistant) or memory stick. Typically, corporations delay installing new security patches from Microsoft until their effectiveness can be tested, or installations are delayed because of the sheer numbers of workstations to be upgraded. Worms are being deployed faster now than the security patches released to block and remove them. To make matters worse, worm creators appear to be launching multiple calculated attacks.

Mikko Hypponen, antivirus research manager for the F-Secure Corp. in Finland said, "We seem to have a botwar on our hands .... There appears to be three different virus-writing gangs turning out new worms at an alarming rate -- as if they would be competing [for] who would build the biggest network of infected machines." (Matthew Fordahl. "Infection Rates in New Windows Worm Low," in Sun-Sentinel.com (18 August 2005).)

What is it with Boca Raton? Scott Levine Convicted

Several studies have shown Boca Raton, Florida to be the epicenter of worldwide spam. The area was once known for being the world's penny stock fraud capital. Our guess is that once the scamsters started to realize how easy online fraud is to execute, they abandoned penny stocks in droves.
Let's face it -- regulators and prosecutors put penny stock scamsters in jail. Yet, for years and years the online world has been filled with scamsters operating with near perfect impunity. If you were a pirate at heart, which venue would you choose? Government ignorance and apathy were the pirates' enablers.
Well, at least this time we can score one for the government. In the news on Friday, a Boca man was conviced of 120 counts of online piracy.
We won't get our hopes up, but perhaps the government is starting to take a few more baby steps in the direction of cleaning up the mess that Cyberspace has become.

A 7 on the Richter Scale: Spammer Must Pay Microsoft $7 Million

Super-spammer Scott Richter and his bankrupt (both morally and financially) venture, OptInRealBig.com, have agreed to pay Microsoft $7 Million to settle claims related to spam related lawsuits. Despite being recognized as the world's 3rd largest spammer, Richter did not admit wrongdoing, which is just plain wrong. Next time, we hope Spitzer will go for jail time.

Changes, New Mission Coming for SPN

Our day jobs have been keeping us busy lately and it's becoming ever clearer that we have to retool the SPN site and the SPN mission. Look for changes, coming soon.

While we're on the issue of changes, we noticed in the news that the Florida Department of Law Enforcement is having a meeting on August 9th about how business can protect themselves from cybercrimes. Let's hope that the FDLE has a new mission as well. Everytime we contacted the FDLE about massive piracy of our websites, denial of service attacks, domain hijacking, et. al., we were completely ignored. To see for yourself if they are finally for real about helping Florida businesses, check them out at www.secureflorida.org.