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Keylogger programs that record passwords and other typed-in text are increasing, according to data from iDefense.

The programs are an increasingly popular tool among identity thieves, the security company said Tuesday. Reports to iDefense, and its own research, indicate that the number of keylogger variants unleashed this year is set to rise 65 percent over last year, reaching nearly 6,200 in total, the company said in a statement on Tuesday.

Each variant could lead to anything from a few to several thousand infections, Ken Dunham, senior engineer at iDefense, said. Keylogger software typically tracks keystrokes on infected computers and is used to try to steal sensitive information such as user names and credit card data.

The biggest problem with keyloggers, which silently relay data to attackers, is that they often go undetected, easily slipping past firewalls and antivirus software, iDefense, a division of VeriSign, said.

“There are so many victims because so few know the risk or the early warning signs,” Joe Payne, vice president of VeriSign iDefense Security Intelligence Services, said in a statement. “You simply can’t stop what you can’t see.”

Early warning signs can include slow performance of a PC, a spike in pop-up messages and other problems.

Computers can become infected with keyloggers in a variety of ways, such as through downloading spyware or e-mail attachments, or through a visit to a chat room or simply to the wrong Web site. The programs typically exploit flaws in Web browser software, including Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

iDefense said keyloggers are typically spread by organized cybercrime rings, which have used them in the past to conduct large-scale money transfers to fund criminal activities. The programs have grown exponentially since 2001, when the firm detected just 275 of them.

From an article on ZDNet.

As announced on the official Firefox web site, Firefox 1.5 RC3 is available for download.
Available for Windows, MacOS and Linux, only in English as of this writing, but expect other languages soon.

Synchronous optical networking, commonly known as SONET, is a standard for communicating digital information using lasers or light emitting diodes (LEDs) over optical fiber as defined by GR-253-CORE from Telcordia. It was developed to replace the PDH system for transporting large amounts of telephone and data traffic.

The more recent Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) standard developed by ITU (G.707 and its extension G.708) is built on experience in the development of SONET. Both SDH and SONET are widely used today; SONET in the U.S. and Canada, SDH in the rest of the world. SDH is growing in popularity and is currently the main concern with SONET now being considered as the variation.

SONET differs from PDH in that the exact rates that are used to transport the data are tightly synchronized to network based clocks. Thus the entire network operates synchronously. SDH was made possible by the existence of atomic clocks.

Both SONET and SDH can be used to encapsulate earlier digital transmission standards, such as the PDH standard, or used directly to support either ATM or so-called Packet over SONET networking.

The basic SONET signal operates at 51.840 Mbit/s and is designated STS-1 (Synchronous Transport Signal one). The STS-1 frame is the basic unit of transmission in SONET.

The Synchronous Transport Module level 1 (STM-1) is the basic signal rate of SDH.

The two major components of the STS-1 frame are the transport overhead and the synchronous payload envelope (SPE). The transport overhead (27 bytes) comprises the section overhead and line overhead. These bytes are used for signalling and measuring transmission error rates. The SPE comprises the payload overhead (9 bytes, used for end to end signalling and error measurement) and the payload of 774 bytes. The STS-1 payload is designed to carry a full DS-3 frame.

The entire STS-1 frame is 810 bytes. The STS-1 frame is transmitted in exactly 125 microseconds on a fiber-optic circuit designated OC-1 (optical carrier one). In practice the terms STS-1 and OC-1 are used interchangeably.

Three OC-1 (STS-1) signals are multiplexed by time-division multiplexing to form the next level of the SONET hierarchy, the OC-3 (STS-3), running at 155.52 Mbit/s. The multiplexing is performed by interleaving the bytes of the three STS-1 frames to form the STS-3 frame, containing 2430 bytes and transmitted in 125 microseconds. The STS-3 signal is also used as a basis for the SDH hierarchy, where it is designated STM-1.

Higher speed circuits are formed by successively aggregating multiples of slower circuits, their speed always being immediately apparent from their designation. For example, four OC-3 or STM-1 circuits can be aggregated to form a 622.08 Mbit/s circuit designated as OC-12 or STM-4.

The highest rate that is commonly deployed is the OC-192 or STM-64 circuit, which operates at rate of just under 10 Gbit/s. Speeds beyond 10 Gbit/s are technically viable and are under evaluation. Where fiber exhaust is a concern, multiple SONET signals can be transported over multiple wavelengths over a single fiber pair by means of Dense Wave Division Multiplexing (DWDM). Such circuits are the basis for all modern transatlantic cable systems and other long-haul circuits.

SONET/SDH was originally developed primarily to transport pulse-code modulated voice traffic in fixed rate 64kbit/s timeslots through a synchronous optical network. Therefore it was inefficient to transport the bursty packet traffic of the Ethernet world. By introducing virtual concatenation, SONET/SDH became capable of transmitting packet-sized data without bandwidth losses. The data payload like Ethernet is mapped to SDH/SONET using X.86 or Generic Framing Procedure(GFP) protocols. Also recent additions like Link Capacity Adjustment Scheme (LCAS) allows for dynamically changing the bandwidth.

From the Wikipedia article on SDH.

An internet spammer convicted of running a £1.6m e-mail scam from a bedroom in his father’s house has been jailed for six years.
Peter Francis-Macrae, of St Neots, Cambs, was found guilty of threatening to kill and blackmail.

The 23-year-old was also convicted of threatening to destroy or damage property, concealing criminal property and fraudulent trading.

He had offered thousands of e-mail and website names when he had no right.

And when victims complained, he threatened to destroy their internet systems by sending millions of spam e-mails.

Peterborough Crown Court heard he also threatened to fire-bomb the headquarters of the county’s trading standards department and petrol-bomb his local police headquarters.

When internet policing group Nominet posted warnings about his activities, he responded by saying he would attack its servers.

Francis-Macrae, who made more than £100,000 per week from the scam, spent £28,000 on designer clothes and on learning to fly helicopters, the court heard.

During the trial, Francis-Macrae defied Judge Nicholas Coleman QC by refusing to reveal where he hid up to £425,000, saying Cambridgeshire Police would “steal” it.

After sentencing, Pc Jody Faro said: “This investigation highlights just how easy it can be to deceive and lie to people using the internet.”

Francis-Macrae was found guilty of two counts of fraudulent trading, one of concealing criminal property, two of making threats to kill, one charge of threatening to destroy or damage property and one count of blackmail.

The 23-year-old was cleared of two charges of making threats to kill.

From BBC News.

Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) is a term describing various technologies for implementing Ethernet networking at a nominal speed of one gigabit per second.

As a result of research done at Xerox Corporation in the early 1970s, Ethernet has evolved into the most widely implemented networking protocol today. Fast Ethernet increased speed from 10 to 100 megabits per second (Mbit/s). Gigabit Ethernet was the next iteration, increasing the speed to 1000 Mbit/s. It was standardized in June 1998.

Gigabit Ethernet is supported over both optical fiber and twisted pair cable. Physical layer standards include 1000BASE-T, 1 Gbit/s over Cat-5e copper cabling and 1000BASE-SX for short to medium distances over optic fiber.

Initially, Gigabit Ethernet was deployed in high-capacity backbone network links (for instance, on a high-capacity campus network). In 2000, Apple’s Power Mac G4 and PowerBook G4 featured the connection. Recently, it has become a built-in feature in many Pentium and Athlon motherboards. In May 2005, the Apple iMac G5 was redesigned to include Gigabit Ethernet. Its desktop and small-network applications include video editing and file transfers.

Gigabit Ethernet is not the fastest Ethernet standard, with the ratification of 10 Gigabit Ethernet in 2002, which is 10 times faster.

From the Gigabit Ethernet article in Wikipedia.
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