PC World – Security researchers are seeing a resurgence of Gumblar, the name for a piece of malicious code that is spread by compromising legitimate but insecure Web sites.

Source

Reuters – Google Inc said more than 2 million businesses now use its online office software, and the Web search leader is going global on Monday with an advertising campaign to lure customers away from Microsoft Corp and IBM products.

AFP – Ubisoft said Monday that a short film based on its blockbuster “Assassin’s Creed” videogame will premier online at YouTube on October 27.

Magic Lantern is a keystroke logging program developed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Magic Lantern was first reported in a column by Bob Sullivan of MSNBC on 20 November 2001 [1], also by Ted Birdis of the Associated Press (Ted Birdis, Washington Post, 11/22/01 “FBI Develops Eavesdropping Tools”).

Unlike previous keystroke logger programs used by the FBI, Magic Lantern can reportedly be installed remotely, via an email attachment or “by exploiting common operating system vulnerabilities.” It has been variously described as a virus and a Trojan horse. It is not known how the program might store or communicate the recorded keystrokes.

In response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed in 2000 by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the FBI released a series of unclassified documents relating to Carnivore, which included the “Enhanced Carnivore Project Plan.” Sullivan’s confidential source said that redacted portions of that document mention “Cyber Knight,”

“. . . a database that sorts and matches data gathered using various Carnivore-like methods from e-mail, chat rooms, instant messages, and Internet phone calls. It also matches files with captured encryption keys.”

Spokesmen for the FBI soon confirmed the existence of a program called Magic Lantern, denied that it had been deployed, and declined to comment further. [2]

The public disclosure of the existence of Magic Lantern sparked a debate as to whether anti-virus companies could or should detect the FBI’s keystroke logger. Birdis reported that at least some anti-virus companies, including Network Associates, maker of McAffee anti-virus products, had contacted the FBI following the press reports about Magic Lantern, to ensure its anti-virus software would not detect the program. [3] Network Associates issued a statement denying this kind of cooperation with U.S. legal authorities within a week, fueling speculation as to which anti-virus products might or might not detect government trojans. [4]

Links

• EPIC site
• Carnivore questions

• [5] First press story about Magic Lantern, CNBC 20 November 2001
• [6] Early wire report (AP) 21 November 2001
• [7] AP story about Magic Lantern 22 November 2001
• [8] San Francisco Chronicle 28 November 2001
• [9] Wired article 29 November 2001
• [10] Villiage Voice 24 May 2002

References

Amanda So and Christopher Woo. “The Case for Magic Lantern: September 11 Highlights the Need for Increased surveillance” Harvard Journal of Law and Technology. v15 p521. (about the legal framework surrounding the use of keystroke loggers in law enforcement)

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

The continuing increase in spam has resulted in rapid growth in the use of spam filter programs: software designed to examine incoming email and separate spam emails from genuine email messages intended for the user.

Unwanted e-mail can be filtered at the desktop, the network email server/email gateway, the Internet Service Provider’s email gateway, or all three locations. While network managers and ISPs can choose hardened email security appliances, services or software designed to interdict both spam and viruses, desktop users are frequently limited to a software-based solution.

A number of commercial spam filtering programs exist and are readily available, but many freeware and shareware spam filters are also available for easy downloading and installation. Spam filters are currently included as standard features in nearly every available email client, though the quality of these built-in filters can be low; for some users, this may necessitate the use of a higher quality filtering solution.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Link Exchange (“Reciprocal Link Exchange”) is the practice of exchanging links with other websites. There are many different ways to arrange a link exchange with webmasters. The simplest way of doing it is to email another website owner and ask to do a link exchange. Also visiting webmaster discussion boards which offer a dedicated link exchange forum where webmasters can request a link exchange be it of a certain category or open to anybody. You place their link on your site, usually on a links page and the other site in return will place a link back to you.

Link exchange has been a long time practice by website owners since the beginning of the WWW. In the last few years (after year 2000), this practice has gained more popularity as search engines such as Google started favoring sites that had more links in the rankings. This system was very accurate at gauging the importance of a website when it first started, leading to the popularity of Google

However according to experts, search engines no longer place a heavy emphasis on reciprocal links. Instead the popularity or credibility of your site is now gauged by one way incoming links to your site. How than do you go about building one way back links to your site? There are a number of proven techniques you can follow:

1. First and foremost your aim should be to link to sites with a similar theme as your site. For example if you site is about “dogs” than it makes sense that back link from another dog or animal related site would be given a heavier weighting that a link from a casino site. You should start by conducting a search with you keywords on the major search engines (MSN, Yahoo, and Google) to come up with a list of sites which appear for that keyword. Next determine the contact info, ideally an e-mail address. Once you have this information, you can simply contact the webmaster (politely) and ask them if they would be willing to link to your site.

2. Another effective way of increasing your link popularity is to write and submit your articles to sites such as articlecity.com. The importance of this is that when you submit your material there is usually a resource box where you can enter the link information to your site. Every time someone publishes your article, you will have a one way link from their site to yours.

3. Submit to directories under the appropriate category. Many directories and human edited and therefore a link from a directory can instantly add credibility to your site. A major directory is Dmoz. Since site submissions are human reviewed, expect at least 6-8 weeks for any kind of response.

4. Submit your URL to link exchange directories where web users such as your self are actively looking to find new relevant link partners. If you search for google.com, ask.com or msn.com for terms: link exchange or link trade you will be able to find some good ones. Here are few that I have found: linkmarket.net, linkexchagned.com and linkpartners.com.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

The creative department — the people who create the actual ads — form the core of an advertising agency. Modern advertising agencies usually form their copywriters and art directors into creative teams. Creative teams may be permanent partnerships or formed on a project-by-project basis. The art director and copywriter report to a creative director, usually a creative employee with several years of experience. Although copywriters have the word “write” in their job title, and art directors have the word “art”, one does not necessarily write the words and the other draw the pictures; they both generate creative ideas to represent the proposition (the advertisement or campaign’s key message).

The other major department in ad agencies is account services or account management. Account service employees work directly with clients and potential clients, soliciting business for the ad agency and determining what clients need and want the agency to do for them. They are also charged with understanding the clients business situation and representing those needs within the agency, so that ads can be brought to bear on the correct problem.

Previously, client services employees wrote the advertising strategy that the creative director (and teams ) would use to create the advertising. However, since the late 1960′s in the UK, and the mid-1980′s in the US, specialist account planners have been tasked with doing this. The account planner was originally employed to “represent the consumer” in the advertising i.e. find the best way to pitch the clients products to people but better understanding them, what they want and how to talk to them. Planning’s role has expanded considerably since it was originally introduced. Pleanners now brand strategists and, to a certain extent, media strategists – using consumer insights to understand where and how people are most receptive to certain messages.

The creative services department may not be so well known, but its employees are the people who have contacts with the suppliers of various creative media. For example, they will be able to advise upon and negotiate with printers if an agency is producing flyers for a client. However, when dealing with the major media (broadcast media, outdoor, and the press), this work is usually outsourced to a media agency which can advise on media planning and is normally large enough to negotiate prices down further than a single agency or client can.

In small agencies, employees may do both creative and account service work. Larger agencies attract people who specialize in one or the other, and indeed include a number of people in specialized positions: production work, [Internet] advertising, or research, for example.

An often forgotten, but extremely important, department within an advertising agency is traffic. Typically headed by a traffic manager (or system administrator), this department is responsible for a number of things. First and foremost is increasing agency efficiency and profitability through the reduction of false job starts, inappropriate job initiation, incomplete information sharing, over- and under-cost estimation, and the need for media extensions. In small agencies without a dedicated traffic manager, one employee may be responsible for managing workflow, gathering cost estimates and answering the phone, for example. Large agencies may have a traffic department of ten or more employees. Department size varies, but its importance remains the same.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

A secondary source of click fraud is non-contracting parties, who are not part of any pay-per-click agreement. This type of fraud is even harder to police because perpetrators generally can not be sued for breach of contract, or charged criminally with fraud. Examples of non-contracting parties are:

• Competitors of advertisers: These parties may wish to harm a competitor who advertises in the same market by clicking on their ads. The perpetrators don’t profit directly, but force advertiser to pay for irrelevant clicks, thus weakening or eliminating a source of competition.
• Competitors of publishers: These persons may wish to frame a publisher. It is made to look like the publisher is clicking on their own ads. The advertising network may then terminate the relationship. Many publishers rely exclusively on revenue from advertising, and can be put out of business by such an attack.
• Other malicious intent: As with vandalism, there’s an array of motives for wishing to cause harm to either an advertiser or a publisher, even by people who have nothing to gain financially. Motives include political and personal vendettas. These cases are often the hardest to deal with, since it is hard to track down the culprit, and if found, there is little legal action that can be taken against them.
• Unwanted “friends” of the publisher: Sometimes upon learning a publisher profits from ads being clicked, a supporter of the publisher (like a fan, family member, or personal friend), will click on the ads, to “help”. However, this can backfire when the publisher (not the “friend”) is accused of click fraud.

Advertising networks try to stop fraud by all parties, but often do not know which clicks are legitimate. Unlike fraud committed by the publisher, it is hard to know who should pay when past click fraud is found. Publishers resent having to pay refunds for something that is not their fault. However, advertisers are adamant that they should not have to pay for phony clicks.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Advertising with search engines is known by different names. It is also called sponsored search. Advertising with search engines could be further classified as follows:

Advertising based on a keyword search

Advertising based on a keyword search could take place through a search engine such as google.com, or a search engine partner site, such as shopping.com. For example, Google offers a service called AdWords, which allows companies, for a small fee, to have a link to their website featured when a user searches a specific keyword which the company specified.

Advertising based on content context

Many search engines (e.g. Google, Yahoo! Search) have partner websites with specific content. The websites agree to let the search engines place content-specific advertising on their website, in return for a fee. The search engine then finds companies interested in advertising on websites with their desired content. For example, an online dog food retailer might have their advertisement placed on a site about dogs.

Both of these advertising formats allow advertisers to target specific users with certain interests. Generally these advertisements are paid for based on either a pay per click campaign or an impression based campaign.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.