Blog Archive: February 2010

Amid all of the other issues Google has been facing lately (security intrusions, buzz complaints, censorship concerns, and the Italian criminal conviction), yet another has surfaced. European antitrust regulators are responding to complaints made by Google's European search rivals. They claim that Google's algorithms are downgrading their internet importance. Google fired back on its blog that it returns more relevant results than competitors, and, in effect, that is why they are mad and tryi...

  Arthur Nadel, the man described as "Mini-Madoff," will likely plead guilty to at least some of the charges leveled against him, securities, wire, and mail fraud, sometime later today in a Manhattan Federal court. Operating out of Sarasota, FL, Nadel conned investors out of $360 million in a ponzi scheme similar to Madoff's. Nadel potentially faces decades in prison.    

  This past Monday, an Alexandria, Virginia Federal court granted a request from Microsoft to allow Microsoft to take down tens of thousands of internet addresses that the company claims are linked to harmful hacking activities and botnets, specifically the Waladec botnet. Microsoft claimed the IP addresses listed in the request are involved in spam, virus propagation, and D-DOS attacks (distributed denial of service, an activity aimed at taking a server down by overloading it with countless...

  In a story that broke a few days ago, Bernard Kerik, the former police commissioner of New York City, was sentenced to four years in prison for tax evasion and lying to federal officials. Kerik was a close associate of former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, and was even nominated in 2004 by George W. Bush for the position of Secretary of Homeland Security. The background checks for the position were the start of Kerik's troubles. Kerik eventually admitted to tax evasion and receiving renovations f...

Google's recent cyber-security problems, which lead the company to threaten to pull out of China if the Chinese government refused to lift internet censorship, may have been perpetrated by a few junior college and university students. According to the New York Times, experts investigating the incursion have pointed to the Shanghai Jiaotong University and the Lanziang Vocational School in the Shandong Province.   A few weeks ago the Jiaotong University won the international "Battle of the Bra...

In the continuing story of the hi-jinks of Raj Rajaratnam, a new indictment was filed this past Tuesday by a New York Federal grand jury. Yet another player has been fingered in this fiasco, a consultant by the name of Danielle Chiesi. Though earlier allegations estimated Raj's ill-gotten gains at around $25 million, the new indictment puts the amount at closer to $50 million.   Just like in the TV shows, the truth comes out when people start squealing. In this case, a tipper (as in provided...

In what's being labeled the biggest hacking bust in the history of China, police in the Hubei Province arrested three people and seized several computers and servers, a car, and 1.7 million yuan ($250,000). The three arrested were allegedly involved in a web site known as the Black Hawk Safety Net (www.3800hk.com) which sells courses in cybersecurity, aka hacking. According to officials, the site has made around $1 million since it started in 2005. It does not appear that the individuals arre...

At the recent conference Combating Cybercrime in Betting and Gaming 2010, a number of interesting topics were covered. Of particular interest to the author of this blog was the coverage of terrorist utilization of the internet for fundraising and money laundering. In an example of cyberterrorism, online gambling sites were used by three men, who were also accused of inciting terror, to launder millions of dollars that had been stolen through online check fraud and identity theft schemes. Appa...

In the eclectic political and economic system of China, a significant crackdown on organized and white collar crime has been in the works for the past few years. China's rich history from dynastic monarchies, a repressive communist revolution, to a capitalism-infused modern economy has long had a connection to the powerful semi-criminal organization commonly referred to as the Triad. In fact, underground groups were a powerful force in the overthrow of the dynastic system in China at the begi...