Italian Parliment to ban Facebook over Mafia Support

AZ — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 08:49:21 +0000

Most famous Networking website Facebook is set to be banned in Italy by lawmakers after they were accused of glamorizing Mafia gangsters. The proposal by Gianpiero D’Alia of the Christian Democrats Udc Party, has already been approved by the Senate and now it’s expected to be approved by the Chamber of Deputies before it becomes law.

Under the proposal, any websites that have postings praising mafia bosses, rapists or other criminals have to delete them or they will be made unavailable within 24hours to web users by local authorities.

“In December a group of fans of mafia godfather Bernardo Provenzano on Facebook were demanding he be made a saint,” Gianpiero D’Alia said today. “Provenzano was linked directly and indirectly to hundreds of murders and whoever supports him supports the mafia and commits a crime in Italy.”

The bill, which gives the interior ministry the power to order Internet providers to block criminal content within 24 hours or face fines of between EUR50,000 (US$64,000) and EUR250,000 (US$321,000), was given initial assent in the Senate last week.

A Google spokesman Friday warned that a proposed new law that would force Italian Internet providers to block access to Web sites that incite or justify criminal behavior could threaten freedom of expression and prove unworkable in practice.

“The order is not directed at the content creator or the person running the platform but at the company that provides Internet connectivity,” Marco Pancini, the head of institutional relations for Google Italy, said in a telephone interview. “Those companies are not in a position to remove a single item, so they would have to black out the entire platform.”

Italy has legislation to block websites considered illegal, but D’Alia said the bill would cut out lengthy court cases. “The government will be able to act fast once a magistrate has informed it that a crime is being committed,” he said. “Websites can then challenge the blocking of content in the courts.”

“This is not aimed specifically at Facebook, yet they did refuse to drop pages honouring mafiosi but at the same time were quick to censor photos of breastfeeding women,” said D’Alia, who added the measure would order the blocking of offending pages, not entire websites.

The measure, originally aimed at Facebook, could also have dire consequences for YouTube, the video-sharing site owned by Google. “The law concerns all the Internet hosting platforms that host user-generated content. Our worry is about its possible effect on the entire Internet ecosystem,” Pancini said.

Facebook is Heaven for Cyber Criminals

AZ — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 07:57:38 +0000

Facebook has been infiltrated by Nigerian scammers and other cyber criminals who use compromised accounts to con users out of cash. Now that even non-tech savvy internet users know not to respond to, or click on links in, emails from strangers, online thieves have turned to social networks and are finding it is easier to trick people when posing as their friends.

On Friday, Sydneysider Karina Wells received a Facebook message from one of her friends, Adrian, saying he was stranded in Lagos, Nigeria, and needed her to lend him $500 for a ticket home.

Adrian used relatively good English but, after chatting further, words such as “cell” instead of “mobile phone” tipped Wells off that she was not talking to her friend but someone who had taken over his account.

Using sites such as Facebook allows scammers to research and target victims more effectively and avoid having their messages blocked by spam filters, said Paul Ducklin, head of technology at Sophos Asia Pacific.

It is likely the scammer obtained Adrian’s Facebook login details after he was infected with a virus delivered by email or in an infected web page.

There are a number of viruses which, once installed on a computer, send back to the hacker a detailed log of everything entered using the keyboard, including online banking details and passwords for services such as Facebook.

Wells played along with the scammer, who asked her to transfer the money into a Western Union account.

“Naturally I was concerned as, to all intents and purposes, this seemed to be legitimate,” she said.

“I pretended that I would help, obtained all the details of where he was and forwarded them to both Facebook and the relevant authorities.”

But while the Nigerian scammer used the compromised Facebook account coupled with social engineering tactics to try to convince Wells to hand over money, many are using compromised accounts to spread malware.

Typically, the victim receives a Facebook message from a friend with a subject such as “LOL. You’ve been catched on hidden cam, yo” or “Nice dancing! Shouldn’t you be ashamed?”

The body of the message contains a video clip link that appears to go to a legitimate site such as Facebook or YouTube but, when clicked on, it takes the user to a bogus web page.

Before the users can play the video they are told they need to download a video player upgrade, which is in fact a password-stealing virus.

The next time the victim logs into Facebook the malware-laden message is sent to all of their friends and the infected link is automatically added in comments on friends’ pages.

Other less sophisticated attacks on Facebook members use spam emails, some appearing to come from Facebook itself, to spread viruses.

In September security firm WebSense reported on spam emails, purportedly sent from an @facebookmail.com address, that tell the victim they have received an invitation from Facebook to add a friend.

“The spammers included a zip attachment that purports to contain a picture in order to entice the recipient to double-click on it. The attached file is actually a Trojan horse,” WebSense said.

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Italian Parliment to ban Facebook over Mafia Support

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