Networking

A private telecom firm took high speed Internet facilities to the top of the world on Thursday when it launched Nepal's first 3G services at the base camp of Mount Everest.

The installation could help the tens of thousands of mountain climbers and trekkers who visit the Mount Everest region in the Solukhumbu district every year. They have to depend on expensive satellite phones to remain in touch with their families as the remote region lacks proper communication facilities.

If the internet is feeling a little more crowded these days, there's good reason. According to a report out Tuesday, there will be 2 billion Web dwellers by the end of this year.

The number of internet users worldwide has doubled in the past five years according to the report, from the International Telecommunication Union. Much of the big number can be attributed to internet growth in developing countries. The report said 162 million of the 226 million new Internet users in 2010 will live in those countries, where Web access is still growing.

Today’s enterprise networks exist in a precarious position. The threats from hackers, crackers, organized crime, viruses, worms and malware have grown in number and sophistication, casting a plaque upon the IT professionals charged with defending and maintaining the network.

Comcast has begun migrating its customers to a new Internet security mechanism that will help protect them from being inadvertently routed to phony Web pages for pharming attacks, identity theft and other scams.

Copyright activists have set their cross hairs on pop singer Lily Allen, crippling her website in the latest of many attacks against anti-piracy pundits.

Allen's site went down a number of times this morning. The distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against the singer appeared to be brief as users suggested targeting artists could generate bad publicity.

There's no doubt that botnets are a major threat to the safety and stability of the internet -- not to mention the cleanliness of your inbox. After years of failure to act, could we finally be seeing ISPs waking up to their responsibilities? Let's take The Long View...

Botnets are a major source of spam, denial-of-service attacks, and other net nasties. For several years, I and others have advocated a more aggressive approach to fighting botnets.

As scheduled, the DDoS attack by Anonymous fired away at 3PM EST. The target list was expanded, encompassing 3 targets: Gallant Macmillian's website, the Ministry of Sound (MOS) website, and MOS' payment website. At the time of this writing, all three websites are offline and cannot resolve to their intended homepages. (MOS' prepay site appears to be in offline/online flux).

Why are these three sites targeted you ask?

The Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack launched by Anonymous against the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) yesterday, has ended up affecting almost 8,000 unrelated websites.

Operation Payback, the DDoS campaign led by Anonymous against anti-piracy groups and entertainment industry associations is now over a week old.

Experts in the inner workings of the Internet’s Domain Name System – which matches IP addresses with corresponding domain names—say the 27-year-old communications protocol does not appear to be the cause of Facebook’s high-profile outage last week.

Facebook’s service was unavailable to its 500 million active users for 2.5 hours on Thursday -- the company’s worst failure in more than four years. Initial news reports blamed the outage on DNS because end users received a “DNS error” message when they couldn’t reach the site.

Researchers at the Queensland University of Technology hope to test and mitigate the risks of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack by creating and running their own internal testbed.