Provided by CommunityDNS, the information in this post consists of news items in the security-based Internet community.

Still No Internet Or SMS Allowed In China’s Muslim Region

Four months after ethnic riots killed 200 people in China’s Muslim region, access to the Internet remains blocked. Important anniversaries were the reason for the continued block, however the last of the important anniversaries is over.

Some companies have had to relocate employees outside the region so they could continue their business of selling products online.

While one marketing manager believes the Internet should come back in about a month, the Chinese government has given little sign as to when restrictions will be lifted, however will do so gradually as the province stabilizes.

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Zurich Insurance admits big data loss

Personal account details were lost on more than 500,000 customers last year, admits Zurich Insurance. Those, whose information was compromised, were 51,000 people from the UK, 550,000 from South Africa and 40,000 from Botswana.

In August, 2008, the data was backed up on tape and sent to the organization’s South African storage center when the tape was lost.

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Operation Eagle Claw nets 18 Nigerian spammers

Determined to remove the country from the list of countries producing the most fraudulent e-mails, Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission. “Eagle Claw”, the operation dedicated for cleaning up Nigeria’s cyber image, should be 100% operational within 6 months. To date, however, the operation has identified and shut down 800 fraudulent web sites/e-mail addresses as well as arrested members from 18 syndicates identified with e-mail scams. When running at full operation, and working closely with Microsoft, Eagle Claw should take down fraudulent e-mails at a rate of 5,000 per month.

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Fed’s Security Spending On A Roll: Over 8 Percent Growth Over Next Five Years

With a 300% increase in attacks on US federal networks and systems over the last 5 years, tightening federal security regulations and President Obama’s emphasis on security, the budget for IT security spending will jump from $7.9 “m”illion to $11.7 “b”illion in 2014.

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Botnet click fraud at record high

Cyber criminals, wishing to profit from click fraud, are turning to botnets to generate the fraudulent clicks. In the 3rd quarter of 2009 42.6% of fraudulent clicks were generated by computer bots.

The increase in botnet use comes at a time when the overall amount of click fraud has dropped; from 16% in Q3 of 2008 to 14.1% last quarter. This signifies the manual form of click fraud has decreased by even a larger margin, thus pointing to the fact that botnets are playing the larger roll in click fraud.

The two most known botnets, Gumblar and Bahama Botnet, place malware on infected computers that will result in PCs returning altered Google results. In other words, if users click on an ad they are, instead, redirected to a site with little to know content. The revenue generated by clicking on the ad is therefore sent to the owner of the fraudulent site instead of the legitimate presenter of the ad.

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FCC Approves Net Neutrality Rule Making

In a unanimous vote the five-member, bi-partisan commission, voted in favor of the rule-making process. This does not mean they agree on the “how” and “to what degree” the Internet should be “open and free” versus “regulated”.

This “rule-making” process opens the door for the formal acceptance of comments on Net neutrality. The comment period will close January 14, with March 14 being the date on which reply comments can be accepted.

One of the republicans that make up the five-member commission disagrees that the FCC has the legal authority to regulate network management of the Internet as proposed.

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