Phishing's latest ruse : QuiteATake.com

When we talk of Internet Time, we intend it to mean as Time out of the range of our limited imagination. Now think of this conundrum. In 1998, the US commissioned a $1 million research project called ‘Signposts in Cyberspace: the Domain Name System and Internet Navigation’. Finally, it’s ready – in 2005. Read the press release at http://www4.nationalacademies.org/news.nsf/isbn/0309096405?OpenDocument. The report is here: http://www.nap.edu/books/0309096405/html/(free online reading). This is a prepublication version subject to final revisions. In other words, more delays, more time lost. According to the Director of the National Research Council's computer science and telecommunications board, the report was delayed because the Internet was changing as fast as researchers could study it.

The study concludes that the domain name system for the Net is working well, that there should be some additional security precautions to prevent security breaches by hackers, and that there should be dozens of new Internet domains such as .com and .net. Ho, hum! So what else is new? And, you thought such stuff happened only in India aka Bharat?

Instant messaging, not spoofed e-mail and Web sites, seems to be the current favourite with phishers for tempting victims to part with confidential information, between December 2004 - February 2005. The Anti-Phishing Working Group, a nonprofit organization that monitors phishing trends, pointed out this development in a recent report. "Previous phishing attacks were based around luring a user to perform an action through social engineering, primarily through spoofed e-mail and Web sites. The use of IM to spoof companies and phish for information is becoming more frequent," says the report. A confirmation of this finding came from Yahoo! It seems that users of its Messenger software were increasingly falling prey to this type of attack. Here, the phisher sends his victim a message including a link to a fake Web site. The fake site, which looks like an official Yahoo site, asks the user to log in by entering their Yahoo ID and password. The scam seems realistic because the incoming message appears to originate from someone on the victim's contact list. http://techrepublic.com.com/2100-10595_11-5647046.html?tag=nl.e019.

Just one year after Google gave the world Gmail, it has doubled online storage available for messages and attachments to 2 gigabytes. Gmail is still in beta testing only as an English-language service. We plan on continuing this increase for the foreseeable future," said Gmail product management director Georges Harik. Yahoo! Mail, available in 15 languages in almost two dozen countries and giving 2GB storage for US$20 a year, too would start offering 1GB of storage free of charge, four times more than it had previously offered. "We're hoping to remove storage as a concern for Yahoo users," Yahoo spokesperson Karen Mahon said. http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,12748019%5E15306%5E%5Enbv%5E,00.html. So, if you feel ‘G’ is for growth, go here: http://gmail.google.com/gmail/help/about_whatsnew.html.

The current hiring boom in the $16 billion outsourcing industry already employing nearly 500,000 people in India's IT capital is to detect and eliminate software glitches estimated to cost around $60 billion a year in the United States alone, according to a National Institute of Standards and Technology estimate. Sohrab Azad, head-hunting company eQURA Consulting’s executive, told Reuters that industry estimates suggest Bangalore alone would need 10,000 testing engineers in the coming six months. Bug testers, it seems, now often make as much as programmers. Says MphasiS BFL’s head of testing, Vidur Kohli: "They used to say this is where failed programmers went. Not anymore."

Last year, India's Aztec Software and Technology Services acquired privately held testing company Disha Technologies for $12 million hinting at the shape of things to come. Recently, Sanjiv Pande, Disha GM, underlined the company’s interest "in acquiring companies that have strong engineering skills, and managements that can scale". C.P. Gangadharaiah, Wipro VP (testing services) said his team had increased fourfold to 2,400 in two years. In the nine months to December, revenue grew 90 percent to $64 million, three times the industry average. Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys, both ahead of Wipro in Indian software sales, agreed that testing is growing apace but did not elaborate further. http://techrepublic.com.com/2100-10597_11-5648321.html?tag=nl.e019.

It was pranks and more pranks as usual on 1 April. Here’s a brief sampler across the Internet. Google Gulp Beta (in 2 flavours, Beta Carroty and Glutamate Grape) is the latest "line of 'smart drinks' designed to maximize your surfing efficiency by making you more intelligent and less thirsty." "Using our patented Auto-Drink technology ... slamming a truckload of electrolytic neurotransmitter smart-drug stimulants past the blood-brain barrier to achieve maximum optimization of your soon-to-be-grateful cerebral cortex," reads the Google Gulp release at http://www.google.com/googlegulp.

Also, an official-looking but phony news release from Google trumpeted its acquisition of the Mozilla Foundation, developers of the Firefox browser. "Google plans to brand these tools," the announcement said. As a special tweak, the release was tagged with the name of a real Google spokesperson. Not to be outdone, Yahoo! announced the launch of Yahoo Slacker on the company's ysearchblog.com site. "The culmination of several efforts to provide a set of integrated services for ... well, slackers," the statement said. Features include "Book Slacker ... a full-text searchable index of Cliffs Notes and Dummies Books," an automatic instant reply for parents which says,

There will very probably soon be three new top-level domains – .eu, .travel and .jobs, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers announced. Of these, .eu will be a country-code domain (ccTLD), at the request of the European Union, after seven years of EU lobbying. The idea is to give companies an address that can reflect pan-European presence and help with cross-border trade within the union. As for jobs and .travel, they are two private ventures submitted as ‘sponsored’ TLDs, or sTLDs for use by members of certain classes of organization. Employ Media LLC and Tralliance Corp respectively will most likely run them. http://www.computer-business-review.com/article_news.asp?guid=297C1D27-65EC-4E77-BCA1-7DB251CB169C.