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The MIT-backed startup behind SiteAdvisor has slapped a red “X” warning label on approximately 5 percent of all Web traffic and warned that there are roughly one billion monthly visits to Web pages that aren’t safe for surfing. About 2 percent of all Web traffic was given the “yellow” caution rating.” A more general SiteAdvisor blog entry overview was covered earlier on Slashdot.
A newly declassified document gives a fascinating glimpse into the US military’s plans for “information operations” - from psychological operations, to attacks on hostile computer networks.
As the world turns networked, the Pentagon is calculating the military opportunities that computer networks, wireless technologies and the modern media offer.
From influencing public opinion through new media to designing “computer network attack” weapons, the US military is learning to fight an electronic war.
The declassified document is called “Information Operations Roadmap”. It was obtained by the National Security Archive at George Washington University using the Freedom of Information Act.
Officials in the Pentagon wrote it in 2003. The Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, signed it.
The “roadmap” calls for a far-reaching overhaul of the military’s ability to conduct information operations and electronic warfare. And, in some detail, it makes recommendations for how the US armed forces should think about this new, virtual warfare.
The document says that information is “critical to military success”. Computer and telecommunications networks are of vital operational importance.
After being hit by a denial of service attack that downed the Million Dollar Homepage site, British student Alex Tew now faces a lawsuit from one of the advertisers on the site.
The winner of the last 1,000 pixels, which sold for US$38,100 on eBay, is threatening to sue because the Web site was offline for six days until Wednesday, the Financial Times reported in its online edition on Thursday.
Eliger Kliger, owner of milliondollarweightloss.com, an online retailer of dieting products, won the auction for the advertising space last week, just before the Million Dollar Homepage succumbed to a denial of service attack.
No legal action has yet been taken, but an attorney for milliondollarweightloss.com told the Financial Times he was preparing to sue over breach of contract and negligence. The main complaint is that the advertisement did not go up immediately after the auction.
The Million Dollar Homepage was launched by Tew, who successfully raised $1 million by selling ad space for $1 per pixel. The site was battling back a DoS onslaught that began last week after an extortion attempt by a cybercriminal.
At an afternoon hearing convened here by the Senate Commerce Committee, Chairman Ted Stevens, an Alaska Republican, lashed out at an adult entertainment industry representative, saying that the industry needs to take swift moves to devise a rating system and to clearly mark all its material as “adult only.”
“I think any adult producer would agree,” said Paul Cambria, counsel to the Adult Freedom Foundation, which represents companies offering “lawful adult-oriented entertainment.” It would just be a matter of organizing the industry, he added.
“My advice is you tell your clients they better do it soon, because we’ll mandate it if they don’t,” Stevens said.
Though it wasn’t mentioned at the hearing, Web browsers have long supported the Internet standard called PICS, or Platform for Internet Content Selection. Internet Explorer, for instance, permits parents to disable access to Web sites rated as violent or sexually explicit.
Many adult Web sites have voluntarily labeled themselves as sexually explicit. Playboy.com and Penthouse.com, for instance, rate themselves using a variant of PICS created by the nonprofit Internet Content Rating Association.
The FBI calculated the price tag by extrapolating results from a survey of 2,066 organizations. The survey, released Thursday, found that 1,324 respondents, or 64 percent, suffered a financial loss from computer security incidents over a 12-month period.
The average cost per company was more than $24,000, with the total cost reaching $32 million for those surveyed.
Often survey results can be skewed, because poll respondents are more likely to answer when they have experienced a problem. So, when extrapolating the survey results to estimate the national cost, the FBI reduced the estimated number of affected organizations from 64 percent to a more conservative 20 percent.
“This would be 2.8 million U.S. organizations experiencing at least one computer security incident,” according to the 2005 FBI Computer Crime Survey. “With each of these 2.8 million organizations incurring a $24,000 average loss, this would total $67.2 billion per year.”