eCrime Researchers Summit 2007 - Papers Available

Some informative papers covering various aspects of analyzing and protecting against phishing attacks were made available at the beginning of this month, courtesy of this year's APWG eCrime Researchers Summit :

"The Anti-Phishing Working Group eCrime Researchers Summit was conceived by APWG Secretary General Peter Cassidy in 2006 as a comprehensive venue for the presentation of the state-of-the-art basic and applied research into electronic crime, engaging every aspect of its development (technical, behavioral, social and legal) as well as technologies and techniques for its detection, related forensics and its prevention."

Papers presented include :

- Examining the Impact of Website Take-down on Phishing
- Fishing for Phishes: Applying Capture-Recapture to Phishing
- Evaluating a Trial Deployment of Password Re-use for Phishing Prevention
- Behavioral Response to Phishing Risk
- Fighting Obfuscated Spam
- A Comparison of Machine Learning Techniques for Phishing Detection
- Getting Users to Pay Attention to Anti-Phishing Education

Everyone's Guide to By-Passing Internet Censorship

Following the recently released "Journey to the Heart of Internet Censorship" report, University of Toronto's Citizen Lab took advantage of the momentum and released a guide entitled "Everyone's Guide to By-Passing Internet Censorship" :

"This guide is meant to introduce non-technical users to Internet censorship circumvention technologies, and help them choose which of them best suits their circumstances and needs."

Here's another interesting perspective that took event recently, the art of using censorship for economic warfare by stealing Internet traffic from the U.S and forwarding the loyal visitors to local Internet properties in China :

"I’ve written previously on the possibility that China may use its firewall as an economic tool as opposed to a censorship tool alone, and although censorship may be partially behind todays blanket ban of US search sites, the redirect to Baidu would indicate an economic motive; if the Chinese Government were serious about censorship alone we would have reports of page not found/ blocked messages, not redirects to Baidu."

It's all a matter of perspective - privacy is just as vital to maintain in a democratic society, as is anonymity in a modern communism societies where f*** speech is a censored word by itself.