QuickLinks - Computer crime

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Issue no. 206 - 3 September 2001

• UK - Paedophile businessman escapes jail (BBC)
  A paedophile businessman wanted by the FBI has walked free from a British court with a fine. Jonathan Aslett, 53, was arrested in Greater Manchester after firefighters tackling a fire at his office spotted pornographic images of children. Aslett was fined £3,250 with £1,000 costs after pleading guilty to 13 charges of making indecent photographs. The maximum sentence is three years.

• USA - Bill Aims To Hammer Net Child Molesters (Newsbytes)
  Rep. Robert Simmons, introduced the latest in a series of bills that aims the big guns of federal law enforcement against online child-sex predators. The "Cybermolesters Enforcement Act," similar to other bills already introduced in the House and Senate, sets five-year mandatory prison sentences for adults who use the Internet to target and lure minors for child molestation.

• USA - Brit accused of creating worm (AP)
  A British man has been arrested on charges that he created and released a virus-like program that was designed to let hackers take control of home computers. Investigators said the man created the W32-Leaves.worm, which infected a few computers earlier this year.

• USA - Commercial child porn ring bust leads to 100 arrests (ZDNet UK)
  The arrest of 100 people subscribing to the largest commercial child pornography ring ever discovered in the United States has called into question the assumption that Internet paedophilia is a non-profit-making activity. A two-year investigation, dubbed Operation Avalanche, came to a head yesterday when US attorney general John Ashcroft issued a string of arrest warrants for child pornography subscribers and merchants in the US, Indonesia and Russia. Among those charged were five international Webmasters, who remain at large. see also U.S. Says It Broke Pornography Ring Featuring Youths ( New York Times) and Law enforcement makes inroads against child porn on Internet (Christian Science Monitor).

• USA - Sen. Clinton Seeks $25M To Fight Net Crime Against Kids (Newsbytes)
  Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, will introduce legislation that seeks $25 million to help state law enforcement agencies fight Internet child pornography and other online crimes against children.

• USA - Teen hacker builds computer business from jail (AP)
  Dennis Moran, an 18-year-old high school dropout, earned international notoriety and a nine-month jail sentence last year for his computer-hacking exploits. Now Moran, who went by the online name Coolio, runs a computer services company that a mentor helped him set up while in jail.

Issue no. 205 - 3 August 2001

• Offshore Internet Sports Gambling Conviction Upheld (Reuters)
  A federal appeals court upheld one of the first convictions of a defendant charged with running an illegal offshore Internet sports gambling operation.

• USA - Congress Covets Copyright Cops (Wired)
  Congress is set to more than double the number of federal copyright cops. A draft of next year's budget includes plans to hire far more Justice Department attorneys and FBI agents who are charged with placing more pirates in prison.

Issue no. 204 - 27 July 2001

• Feds bulk up to fight cybercrime (ZDNet News)
  U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft said federal officials would crack down on an increasing wave of cybercrime by beefing up 10 specialized units, dubbed Computer Hacking and Intellectual Property, or CHIP. The units will focus on copyright theft, computer fraud and hacking.

• Secret Service's Little-Known Role: Protecting Citizens as Well as Leaders (Roll Call)
  The United States Secret Service is actively engaged in the fight against Internet crime and computer-based fraud.

• UK - Home Office to criminalise chatroom meetings (ZDNet UK)
  The home secretary has accepted recommendations made by the Home Office Internet taskforce to criminalise the online "grooming" of children, making it a criminal offence for an Internet paedophile to meet a child offline with the intention of sexually abusing them. See also Paedophiles face crackdown - online and offline (Home Office Press Release) .

• UK - Anger as Internet paedophiles freed (ITN)
  Child welfare campaigners are outraged that the first of seven Internet paedophiles jailed for involvement in the notorious Wonderland Club could be behind a computer terminal next month.

• USA - Distributed.outrage (Salon)
  How could installing a screensaver be a crime against the state?

• USA - Federal Cybercrime Unit Needs Work (Newsbytes)
  The federal government's top cybercrime-fighting agency is not fully living up to its responsibility to protect the nation's critical infrastructure, a new report finds. See also U.S. drive on computer crime falls short (Reuters)

Issue no. 203 - 19 July 2001

• Canada - Groups assail web sites for 'boy lovers' (National Post)
  Child advocacy groups are pushing the Canadian branch of MCI/WorldCom, one of the world's biggest Internet companies, to close down a group of Montreal-based Web sites that offer advice, pictures and discussion groups for men who "love boys."

• German court sets child porn penalty (AP)
  Distributing child pornography on the Internet is no different from circulating such material in print and will carry a sentence of up to 15 years, Germany's top criminal court announced.

• Hong Kong Mulls Measures To Fight Computer Crime (Newsbytes)
  The Hong Kong government is considering a number of legislative and other initiatives to tackle cyber crime, including forcing people to hand over encryption keys and requiring Internet service providers (ISPs) to keep subscriber records longer.

• New Australian Force For Electronic Crime (Computer Daily News)
  The Australian Bureau of Criminal Intelligence (ABCI) has launched the latest part of an intelligence-sharing network aimed at tackling electronic crime. The new facility will provide a repository of e-crime information that can be accessed by law enforcement agencies across all Australian jurisdictions.

• New Zealand Hacker Convicted In Landmark Case (Newsbytes)
  A landmark court case in New Zealand has resulted in the conviction of a hacker who in 1998 deleted thousands of home pages from a server based in the U.S.

• Australia - Child porn fiction gets fine of $10,000 (The West Australian)
  A man has been fined $10,000 for possessing stories about child pornography even though the judge said they were not as serious as pornographic pictures because they were fictional and there were no victims.

• UK - Blunkett briefed on barring abusers from net (Ananova)
  The Home Secretary is being updated on the latest ideas to protect children from abusers on the internet by the Government's taskforce on child protection on the internet. The Government has pledged the taskforce will make UK cyberspace the safest place in the world for internet users.

• UK - Hacker learns internet deception isn't child's play (Independent)
  A Welsh teenage hacker was sentenced on six counts of breaking into computer systems in the Britain, America and Canada, and two counts of "obtaining services by deception". After pleading guilty to the charges at Swansea Crown Court, he was given a three-year community probation order linked to treatment for a mental disorder. U.K. Student Given Three Years Probation For Hacking

• UK - Internet Watch Foundation Resolves Newsgroup Policy (Press Release)
  IWF will now recommend that UK ISPs review their policies on newsgroups and consider their coverage of groups that are shown to be regularly receiving child porn images. see also IWF says ISPs must drop illegal newsgroups (ZDNet UK).

• UK - Loner jailed for child porn (icWales)
  A man was jailed after admitting downloading 162 hardcore pornographic images of children. Cardiff Crown Court heard that police raided 35-year-old factory worker Paul Reynolds's home after discovering he had paid for explicit pictures of children aged between four and nine years engaged in sex acts.

• UK - Pornography custody threshold (The Times)
  In sentencing an offender for offences of downloading pornographic photographs of children, the court, in considering whether or not the custody threshold was passed, should take into account (i) that distribution, depending on its extent, or further dissemination of obscene material was almost inevitably likely to be an aggravating factor and (ii) the degree of obscenity involved in the image.

• UK - Shopper sent pornographic rhymes (BBC)
  A supermarket chain has launched an investigation after one of its staff sent a female customer a collection of violent and pornographic nursery rhymes by e-mail. She had registered her details on Safeway's website in order to be told about products and special promotions.

• USA - Cyber-crime data sharing bill could face uphill battle (Newsbytes)
  House lawmakers reintroduced legislation designed to encourage businesses to share information on cyber-attacks with the government and each other by exempting such sharing from antitrust and public scrutiny.

Issue no. 202 - 5 July 2001

• Germany - Härtere Strafen für Handel mit Kinderpornografie im Netz (Heise)
  Kinderschänder, die Bilder ihrer Taten im Internet verbreiten, müssen künftig mit härteren Strafen rechnen. Nach einem Grundsatzurteil des Bundesgerichtshofes (BGH) ist auch die beabsichtigte Weitergabe von Daten mit kinderpornografischem Inhalt über das Netz als eine Verbreitung von verbotenen Schriften zu sehen. Der BGH stellte ausdrücklich klar, dass Provider von dem Urteil nicht betroffen sind.

• Russia - Cyber-Verbrechen in Russland auf Rekordhoch (Heise)
  Verbrechen im Cyberspace haben in Russland längst das Ausmaß von Drogenhandel oder Waffenschmuggel erreicht.

Issue no. 201 - 26 June 2001

• High-Tech Lukewarm On More Cyber-Crime Laws (Newsbytes)
  Lawmakers contemplating the need for stronger cyber-crime laws received mixed signals from high-tech leaders, some of whom called for additional regulations while others urged stronger enforcement of laws already on the books.

• International cybercrime treaty finalized (CNET News.com)
  A committee of the Council of Europe signed off on the final draft of a broad treaty that aims to help countries fight cybercrime, but which critics say sacrifices privacy protections. When ratified by the council's leadership and signed by individual countries, the Convention on Cyber-Crime will bind countries to creating a minimum set of laws to deal with high-tech crimes, including unauthorized access to a network, data interference, computer-related fraud and forgery, child pornography, and digital copyright infringement. see also Committee on Crime Problems approves final draft of Cyber-crime Convention (Council of Europe)
  see also Cyber-crime: the law moves in.

• Netherlands to prosecute 'Kournikova' worm author (IDG)
  The 20-year-old Dutchman who says he created and unleashed the so-called "Anna Kournikova" e-mail worm will be prosecuted, according to authorities in the Netherlands.

• Russian Hacker Indicted On Wire Fraud, Extortion Charges (Newsbytes)
  A Russian computer hacker already awaiting trial in two states on allegations of computer intrusion and fraud was indicted by a federal grand jury on 15 additional counts relating to computer crimes allegedly committed in California.

• USA - Law Targeted At Net Pedophiles Passes House Subcommittee (Newsbytes)
  U.S. law enforcers would be given broader powers to track and pursue pedophiles who target children over the Internet under a bill approved by the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Crime. The bill does not create any new crimes, but rather classifies existing child enticement and child pornography offenses as predicate offenses under existing wiretapping authority.

Issue no. 200 - 14 June 2001

• Democratic Control of Europol (RAPID)
  Speech by António Vitorino, European Commissioner for Justice and Home Affairs, Europol Conference organised by the Senate and House of Representatives of the Dutch States General, The Hague, 8 June 2001

• Endgame for Cybercrime treaty (SecurityFocus.com)
  by David Banisar. A few weeks ago, the Council of Europe's (COE) Committee of Experts on Cyber-crime working group met in a closed meeting in Rome to put the finishing touches on the ever-troubling "Draft Convention on Cyber-crime". The touches were light: little more than a feather dusting with a couple of feel-good changes thrown in for good measure.

• Ex-Student Indicted in E-Blackmail (AP)
  A former Colorado State University graduate student was indicted on charges he used e-mail in an attempt to blackmail a New Jersey company that sells digital books over the Internet.

• Justices Say Warrant Is Required in High-Tech Searches of Homes (New York Times)
  The Supreme Court ruled that the use by the police of a thermal imaging device to detect patterns of heat coming from a private home is a search that requires a warrant. see excerpts and full text (Findlaw).

• Kinderpornos auf Behördencomputer (Heise)
  Beamte der Dienststelle für Sexualdelikte des Hamburger Landeskriminalamtes haben in zwei Fällen Kinderpornografie auf Behördencomputern entdeckt.

• Police probe 1,800-strong Internet paedophile ring (ZDNet UK)
  Scotland Yard is investigating an Internet paedophile ring that could be the largest ever found in Britain. A spokesman for the Metropolitan Police said that the paedophile "club" it is investigating could dwarf the Wonderland Club, previously the largest Internet porn ring ever uncovered in Europe.

• Un cyberflic français d'Europol inculpé aux Pays-Bas (Yahoo FR)
  L'organisation policière de l'Union européenne Europol, dont le siège est à La Haye, a confirmé à ZDNet qu'un de ses agents de la division informatique avait été interpellé par la PJnéerlandaise dans une affaire d'argent sale.

• USA - Top DOJ Official Outlines Priority List to Combat Cybercrime (Computerworld)
  Michael Chertoff, a newly confirmed assistant attorney at the Justice Department, told a congressional subcommittee that U.S. law enforcers need more resources to combat cybercrime and better laws to simplify the tracing of suspects over the Internet.

Issue no. 199 - 4 June 2001

• «Code as code»? (Neue Zürcher Zeitung)
  Von Prof. Dr. Ulrich Sieber. Lässt das Internet die nationalen Strafrechtssysteme ins Leere laufen?

• Cyberspace evidence seizure upheld (MSNBC)
  Upholding the rights of law enforcement to cross national borders in pursuit of cyberspace criminals, a federal judge has ruled that FBI agents did not act improperly when they tricked a pair of suspected hackers out of passwords and account numbers and then downloaded evidence from their computers in Russia.

• G8 concludes Tokyo high-tech crime meeting (IDG)
  The G8 Group of the world's seven leading industrial nations and Russia made progress on an action plan to battle high-tech crime. The G8 Government/Private Sector High Level Meeting on High-tech Crime, held in Tokyo from May 22 to 24, covered five major themes in a series of workshops: data retention, data preservation, threat assessment and prevention, protection of electronic commerce, and user authentication and training.

• Internet founder worried over EU cybercrime plans (Reuters)
  Vint Cerf said that European Union plans for new rules to fight crime on the Web risked clashing with existing EU privacy regulations. He said in an interview that Internet traffic should be retained only for billing purposes and was too cumbersome to be stored for police investigations.

• Police to flood stolen mobiles with messages (Times)
  Police are to bombard stolen mobile telephones with text messages to make them unsaleable and unusable. Scotland Yard and Merseyside police are studying a Dutch police project in Amsterdam that cut mobile phone thefts by up to 60 per cent in a month.

• Time to crack down on child porn (MSNBC)
  Brock Meeks writes about Mike Echols, who founded a non-profit organization called "Better a Millstone" dedicated to hunting down and making life miserable for child pornographers. He has so far been unable to get the FBI to act against two Web sites that appear to traffic in child porn, wantonly operating in the open and charging fees for full access. He has turned to the online press to bring pressure on the FBI.

• EU - Fraud and counterfeiting of non-cash means of payment (Press Release)
  Following the Agreement in principle reached at its meeting of 29 May 2000, the Council adopted formally a Framework Decision on combating fraud and counterfeiting of non-cash means of payment, the European Parliament having meanwhile approved this proposal.

• UK - Boss 'found internet ace's child porn pictures' (Ananova)
  An internet web designer "obsessed" with child pornography was rumbled when his boss used his computer, a court has heard.

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