Interesting facts....hahahahah

I feel frustrated when it's so hard to find a person in my friend list nowadays.. Sad, because the reason why i migrated to Facebook in the 1st place was because, unlike Friendster, people use their real names there..

The same reason why i use my real name for my e-mail address, because apparently i'm not ashamed of my own name, no matter how weird it might sound to some people sometimes...beepee......... IT'S MY NICKNAME DR Bahma.

Plus, i think nicknames are too childish.. Imagine this scenario, when you already became a well-established person in the future.. a doctor.. a laywer.. or a businessman even.. Then a VVIP came to you and asked for your e-mail address.. You reluctantly answer, "Err, it's bp_boy03@hotmail.com

I also find it amusing when people, without thinking, put their relationship status as "in an open relationship". Do they even know what it actually means?

Well, it's used when a certain couple agreed to let each other have intimate relationships with other people at the same time, be it outside or inside a marriage. Now think again, do you really fall into that category?

And lastly, i know some might disagree on this one.. But in my opinion, some things are better left off limits, no matter how two persons love each other.. Like e-mail passwords and social network accounts.. I know you trust each other.. I also know that some might say, "I don't have anything to hide, so what's the problem?"

But would you two walk around the house naked after marriage, simply because technically, u "don't have anything to hide"? No? Why still hide it then?.hahahahahahahahahahahahaha

I HAVE RECEIVED IT...HAD YOU????PHISING MAILS

Remember the first rule of making money? Don’t lose your money. I’m sure if you use the internet and email, eventually you will receive emails like the one below.




Many people will just click on the link without giving it too much thought. In this case, this email seem to come from CIMB but I’ve receive from other banks as well.

What makes this email seem so authentic is the way the phisers put CIMB, highlighted in yellow. However when you look closer, you can see the email was sent out from a site I underlined in red. I’m sure banks or any financial institution will not send out emails from a different server.

So, the next time when you get such an email, you’ll know it is a scam. Delete it immediately and don’t even click on the links. Some emails have been known to carry virus that is downloaded just by clicking on such links. So remember, don’t fall for phishing scams.

Google revealed that it had mistakenly collected information about Internet sites people had visited on public Wi-Fi networks.

The admission came from Google engineering head Alan Eustace in the form of a blog post. In the statement, Google said that it had been unknowingly gathering the personal data for over three years through its Street View photo-mapping feature. The discovery was made during internal investigation resulting from earlier concerns by German regulators over the issue. Two weeks ago, Google told European officials that, while it did collect data from Wi-Fi services for location technologies, it did not save private user data. In yesterday's announcement, however, Google admitted that these claims were actually incorrect.

An estimated 600 gigabytes of personal data had apparently been collected because of a software error from 2006. Google Street View vehicles caught bits of information from unsecured or public Wi-Fi networks in both Europe and the United States, as well as around 30 other countries where Street View is used.
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In my opinion google should had at least checked their systems frequently so that they will be able to detect the fault in its system. Google must had also asked the permission to the countries so that other relevant information which also gets included in the system is usable or not.Google in order for them to be on the save side can use the Internet Service Provider (ISP) as a defendent as its the ISP which provides the information captured on the google software. In this example Google could sue the ISP as they provide google with information which is not needed by them.

Meghna Naidu's email hacked

Item girl Meghna Naidu's email id was hacked and the hacker used her account to write obscene mails about her, a police complaint filed by the actress said.

“I came to know that my gmail account has been hacked Saturday. The person was chatting with my friends and writing all obscene things about me. While talking with my friends, the impostor wrote that I am pregnant and wanted to abort the child,” Meghna told IANS Wednesday.
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From the act done by the hacker there is clearly an act of DEFAMATION

Defamation is the act of damaging the reputation of another by means of false and injurious communications that expose that person to contempt, ridicule, or social hatred.

IT OCCURED IN slander -oral communication

Meghna should had :
changed her password often
don't share it with others and also keep away form joining unauthorized groups which has cookies which would be able to track her personal information

PREVENTING E-MAIL PHISHING

Email identity theft is perpetrated to convince others that they are legitimate firms that have legitimate reasons for asking for people's financial information such as bank access, credit card numbers and so forth. This is phishing.

The first suggestion for prevention of email identity theft is to use a DNS service supplier or domain registrar not related to your Web host company. This is useful to prevent your being blocked on the Web if someone passes themselves off as you and commits phishing or spamming expeditions.

You might want to take this one step further and keep a second copy of your site as a hot backup from a second server and host provider. If the first host company fails you can switch quickly.

Shorten your Time to Live (TTL) settings, which will limit your DNS records lifetime. The longer your cached copies of the DNS records are available the longer users can be directed to the fraudulent site.

If you can, choose a host that gives you an IP address that is not shared. If you share your address and the other sites are victims of email identity theft, you could be shut down when they are.

Finally, if you are a consumer and receive an email from a bank or what seems a legitimate business, never click on the link in the email. Manytimes these will take you to sites that may look ligitimate, but are set up to try to dup you into providing personally identifiable information.Never transact business with people or companies you don't know and can't verify.

PREVENT IDENTITY THEFT

There are basically some measures to actualy be save on the usage of internet to saveguard informations. In my opinion i have listed certain ways to protect online theft
1. Protect your Social Security number

2. Treat your trash and mail carefully

3. Be on guard when using the Internet

4. Select intricate passwords

5. Verify sources before sharing information

6. Safeguard your purse and wallet

7. Store information in secure locations

SPYING ON KIDS.......for good reasons

In the wake of fears over paedophiles 'groooming' children on the internet, parents are now using powerful software to monitor what their offspring do and say online.

The sophisticated programmes, which seem more suited to the world of espionage than a child's bedroom, can record and analyse every word typed into a computer while a child surfs the net.

Some of the software programmes can compile daily or weekly reports and email them to parents who can check for signs of paedophile activity or see if their children have sought access to unsuitable websites. The reports give a detailed breakdown of what the child typed into chatrooms, emails or message boards and also replies.

By having this actions taken, parents will be able to monitor the kid's behavior and also prevent unethical things which could destroy their kids future...Parents could protect a child by controlling what he or she can and cannot access.

more information can be sough at http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2003/feb/02/security.childrensservices

Malaysia Lottery International: You Won 2.5 Million Dollars – Identity Theft Fraud

Malaysia Lottery International [info@mala.com]: You Won 2.5 Million Dollars?? I certainly don’t think so. Granted it would be great to win so much money I know that this is another identity fraud operation with an intent to collect lots and lots of money from unsuspecting individuals. Here’s the short write up along with a phone number to call (of course, don’t call it):

You won $2.5 Million Dollars from the Malaysia Sweepstakes.Mr Andy Jerry fordelivery of your Cheque via email:asiapacific_2000@verizon.net

+60142672160
Congratulations once more from all members and staffs of this program.

Yours Truly,
Goh Song Keng.
Online Co-Ordinator

—————————————————————-
This message was sent using http://webmail.coqui.net



In my opinion whatever a person do don’t reply in any shape of form. You will most likely fall victim to personal information theft and financial fraud. This email is very short but a succinct one. This is a dangerous fact! This cases are quite on the rise in malaysia. Users should not reply this emails as the information can be leaked to them.Always ignore these mails.The respondent will be persuaded to give his personal information such as BANK ACCOUNT NUMBER which could lead to theft by the scammers.

How to Stay Safe On Facebook

THIS ARE SOME PRECAUTIONS YOU NEED TO TAKE TO STAY PRIVATE AND SAFE:)

Make friend lists

Categorise your “friends” into various groups according to what information you want them to have access to, from “Work Friends” (minimal access) to “Acquaintances”, “Family” and “Close Friends” (full access).

Restrict access to profile

To prevent strangers from accessing your page, it is advisable to allow “Only Friends” to access your profile.

Remove your address and phone number

This may be useful information for your real friends and family but imagine what will happen if the information falls into the wrong hands.

Remove your full birthdate from your profile

dentity thieves can use it to obtain more information on you and even gain access to your bank or credit card account. If you want to remind your friends about your birthday, remove the year.

Be careful when registering for new applications

It is all fun and exciting to try out new games and quizzes but what many don’t realise is that you may unknowingly be sharing all your information with the developers who can then sell your data or spam you.Go to “Privacy Settings” and tick “Applications”, followed by “Settings”. Uncheck the boxes for the personal information that you do not want them to obtain.

Facebook Addresses Several Privacy Problems

Facebook has come under under fire recently for its recent string of privacy-unfriendly practices, from its “privacy transition” that took away privacy controls to “instant personalization” that instantly shares personal information with third party pages without the user's consent.

Problem #1: Giving Users Control Over All Information They Share Via Facebook

Users share a wide range of information via Facebook: friends lists, photos, education and work history, religious and political leanings, relationship status—the whos, whats, whens, hows, and whys of their lives

What Changed Today:
For profile information, you can now use a single click to change all of their settings to “Everyone,” “Friends of Friends,” “Friends Only,” or Facebook's “Recommended” settings. You can also still fine-tune your own settings. Having controls that are actually easy to use—even for unsophisticated users—is a significant improvement.

Problem #2: Sharing Information With Third Parties Without Users’ Opt-In Consent

Third party applications and websites have access to a huge amount of information about individuals .Facebook has increased the amount of information these apps and pages can access and taken away some of the few controls users had to prevent this access. And Facebook recently took this one step further with "instant personalization," allowing some websites to access Facebook user information without giving notice to the user first

What Changed Today:
Facebook addressed third party sharing in two ways. First, it made it easier for users to opt out of “instant personalization” entirely by providing a single privacy control to disable instant personalization via friends as well as directly. Second, Facebook has restored the option to opt out of third party sharing entirely.

6 preventive measures for privacy invasion

1.Run a credit report on yourself to see if there are any unknown credit inquiries or unauthorised accounts.

2.Reconcile your cheque and credit card statements in a timely fashion and challenge any purchases that you did not make.

3.Limit the number of credit cards you have to reduce exposure, and cancel any inactive accounts.

4.Destroy all unused pre-approved credit card and loan applications. The mailbox thief only has to fill them out and redirect the return address to start using your credit.

5.Never give any important number out like from your credit card, bank account, date of birth, or NRIC number to anyone you don’t know over the telephone.

6.Don't give away too much personal information on your personal web site. Full names, date of births and address is too much information to post. By obtaining your "place-of-birth," the identity thief can possibly get your duplicate birth certificate.

IDENTITY THEFT

Identity theft can take many forms. An illegal immigrant may use you NRIC number and date of birth for employment purposes or to obtain a birth certificate. Imagine the confusion that can be created when the IRS wants to know why you did not declare the extra income reported to them from someone using your name and NRIC number.

Most often, an identity thief will obtain your personal identification numbers from the trash and obtain credit in your name by having credit cards, goods or services delivered to their address or mail drop. Since the bills for the charges incurred with be sent to the thief's address, not yours, you will be unaware that debt is mounting up in your name until the collections department tracks you down. By then your credit report will already be riddled with late payment histories and show many accounts in collections. As you can imagine, the credit reporting bureaus will be reluctant to change negative credit without proof that you had not created the bad credit.

Identity theft can significantly traumatise anyone because it is unnerving to know (or not know) the extent of the damage to your name, credit or reputation. There have been cases reported where victims took many years to restore their credit and good names, and had problems cashing cheques, obtaining loans or even renting apartments.

Poor privacy protection in Malaysia

Malaysia scored miserably in the international ranking on privacy for 2007 mainly due to the continued use of the Internal Security Act which allows for police search and seizure of evidence without a warrant, the installation of closed-circuit television (CCTV) and the use of biometrics to monitor immigrants in an environment where privacy laws and data protection do not exist.

Malaysia’s poor record in privacy protection was said to be because of the absence of right to privacy in the constitution and other laws. Instead, there is interception authorised by the attorney general, the use of identification schemes (Mykad and the biometric), and the installation of CCTVs with no privacy safeguards. The report also said there is a “plan to implement a citizen data hub across government departments to keep information on individuals’ backgrounds, education, and health records.”

The Mykad has the capacity of holding personal details and banking information and private mobile numbers are easily obtained by sales people of any service or product without prior approval of the individual. Loan applicants are subject to a credit worthiness check supplied by a private company that could potentially blacklist individuals, also without their knowledge

On the one hand, individual information is not protected and can be use virtually by anyone for any purpose, but the authorities protect public interest information such as development deals, concessionaire agreements and consultancy agreements secret under the Official Secrets Act,

Have you ever wondered which countries face the most cybercrime?

http://www.enigmasoftware.com/top-20-countries-the-most-cybercrime/

WANA GET RICH......THIS WAY

In most cases, victims of unauthorized withdrawals had received an unidentified (SMS) Short Messaging System (from fraudster) to inform them that they have won a cash prize. I would believe that most of us would feel excited to receive such an announcement even though it’s fake. Who doesn’t want easy money?

• To claim the promised cash prize, the victim is to open an internet banking account. I can bet, there’s still a lot of people who doesn’t know what is internet banking!

• The victim then contacts the fraudster and the fraudster will provide a step-by-step guide on how to register and activate their internet banking account using the ATM terminal.

• At point of registration at the ATM terminal, the victim will be given an internet banking personal identification number (PIN). The fraudster will ask the victim for this PIN and use it to create an internet banking account for the victim.

• The fraudster will then ask the victim to register the fraudster’s mobile phone number in order to obtain an Authorization Code to enable transfer of funds via internet banking.

This will result in the Authorization Code being sent via SMS directly to the fraudster’s mobile phone. The victim has now unknowingly provided the fraudster with full access to their banking account.

ATM GET RICH SCAMSSSSS

Well, to some people (including myself) the information seemed too simple that nobody cares about it. Thus, the number of fraud cases involving ATM are increasing each day.

Based on investigations, all of these cases were due to customers knowingly or unknowingly divulging their personal information such as personal identification numbers (PIN) and passwords to fraudulent parties. The transactions involved were genuine, using complainants’ account information and followed the required process. CCTV recordings had captured the complainants activating access to Internet banking at ATMs. Most complainants were not Internet savvy and failed to understand that their own actions had led to the fraudulent withdrawal of funds from their accounts.

In order to prepare and avoid ourselves from being scammed, it is better to know and understand the modus operandi.

I

Email privacy at work: Your employer can lie to you about reading your emails… and then fire you for relying on these lies!

Most employees probably know that the emails sent from their work email accounts are probably being monitored. However, what if your employer repeatedly assures you that all e-mail communications would remain confidential and privileged? What if your employer further tells you that e-mail communications could not be intercepted and used by against you as grounds for termination or reprimand? Can your employer still intercept your emails, read them, and then fire you for the contents…? YOU BET!!hahahaha

In Smyth v. Pillsbury Co., 914 F. Supp. 97 (1996), Pillsbury maintained a company e-mail system which the employees used to communicate among themselves. Mr. Smyth was an employee of Pillsbury. Pillsbury assured Mr. Smyth as well as the other employees that all e-mail communications would remain confidential and privileged and that the e-mail communications could not be intercepted and used against the employees as grounds for termination or reprimand.

The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania surprisingly held that despite the assurances made by Pillsbury, its employees did not have a “reasonable expectation of privacy in e-mail communications voluntarily made by an employee to his supervisor over the company e-mail system.” The Court went on to hold that no “reasonable person would consider the . . . interception of these communications to be a substantial and highly offensive invasion of his privacy.”

So, In my opinion These are some of the preventive measures in order to avoid the hassle and problem of emials in office ?

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1. Always assume that your employer will read every email you send from work or home (using remote access to your work email).
2. If your employer assures you that your emails will remain confidential… do not believe it.
3. If your employer assures you that your emails will not be used to reprimand or fire you… do not believe it.
4. Email privacy at work does not exist.

CYBERCRIME and the Hazards with it

The term “ Cybercrime” is broadly defined to include any criminal activity committed on the internet. Almost everyone has at least a basic understanding about online identity theft, probably the most common cybercrime. However, there appears to be considerable confusion regarding some of the other basic cybercrimes and their definitions. I recently visited the website of a firm where the terms phishing and spoofing were incorrectly used interchangeably!

Some of the most common cybercrimes are:

Email spoofing – The forgery of an e-mail header in a manner that the message appears to have originated from somewhere other than the actual source. Widely used by spammers, a spoofed e-mail may appear to be from a legitimate source asking for personal information, passwords, credit card numbers, etc.

Phishing – The sending of an email to a recipient in an attempt to scam the recipient into revealing private information. The email contains a link to what appears the website of a legitimate enterprise but is only a fake version of the organization’s website. When the recipient visits the fake website, the recipient is asked to update personal information, such as passwords and credit card, social security, and bank account numbers that the legitimate organization already has.

Cookie Poisoning – Some websites store cookies on your computer's hard drive to authenticate your identity, speed up your transactions, monitor your behavior, and personalize your website experience. Cookie poisoning is the modification of a cookie by an attacker to gain unauthorized access to private information about the user. The attacker may use this private information for identity theft and to gain access to the user's existing accounts.

Wardriving - War driving is the process of traveling around using a Wi-Fi enabled computer looking for wireless access point signals that can be used to get network access. The most common use of wardriving is to steal somebody else’s Internet access.

Malware “malicious software” – The developing of a program or file that is harmful to a computer, including computer viruses, worms, Trojan horses, and spyware.

Pod Slurping - The unauthorized download of data from a computer to a storage device such as a MP3 player, flash drive or iPod. This technique is commonly used by data thieves to steal contents from corporate computers.

Cyber stalking – Cyber stalking is a crime in which the attacker harasses a victim using electronic communications such as email, instant messaging, or forum posts. Unlike a spammer, a cyberstalker targets and usually threatens a specific victim.

Cyberlaw is a term that encapsulates the legal issues related to use of communicative, transactional, and distributive aspects of networked information devices and technologies.

It is less a distinct field of law in the way that property or contract are, as it is a domain covering many areas of law and regulation.

Some leading topics include intellectual property, privacy, freedom of expression, and jurisdiction.


TYPES OF CYBERCRIME
1. Unauthorized Access to Computer System and Service
2. Illegal Contents
3. Data Forgery
4. Cyber EspionageCyber Sabotage and Extortion
5. Offense against Intellectual Property
6. Infringements of Privacy
7. Cracking
8. Carding