419 Scammers target Facebook users

Facebook has been infiltrated by scammers 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.

This article was extracted from http://www.itnewsafrica.com/?p=1688. Should you require further clarification, please visit the respective website.



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Vodafone job cuts may impact negatively on South Africa

British firm, ­Vodafone, which last week announced that it was purchasing an additional 15 percent of South Africa’s Vodacom, is expected to announce job cuts that are aimed at saving its operational costs.

The company, which now controls 65 per cent of South Africa’s leading cellular network, seeks to implement various cost cuts, as it bids to generate savings of £1 billion (R16billion) a year.

While fears abound that the new measure could lead to substantial job cuts in Vodafone’s European workforce, it is still not clear how the South Africa subsidiary will fit into the announcement.

Sales for the company have apparently been very low for the communications company in the UK and Spanish markets, leading to the new plan.

On Tuesday (11 November 2008) the company is expected to post a half-year operating profit of £5.7 billion on sales of £19.8 billion.


This article was extracted from http://www.itnewsafrica.com/?p=1679. Should you require further clarification, please visit the respective website.

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DSL subscriptions dropping drastically

WORLD DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) subscriptions are dropping, while speeds lines are simultaneously increasing, giving subscribers value for their money, a market research survey revealed last week.

With a drop rate of 20 per cent during the first three quarters of this year, DSL has the largest average worldwide price drop.

Broadband users are said to have paid $66.75 on average for a subscription during the first quarter and $53.32 during the third.

In comparison the average subscription prices for cable Internet was down ja little over 12 percent and for different versions of fiber access to the home, usually dubbed FTTx, was down by 6.5 percent.

Point Topic CEO, Oliver Johnsons, attributed the drop to to competitive pressure, and the current world economic climate.

Middle East and African subscribers are said to be paying paying over $46 per megabit for DSL access, compared to Western Europe where subscribers are paying only $6.23 per megabit.

The average price per megabit using DSL in the North America and Asia Pacific is $16.10 and $3.80, respectively.

Fiber is by far the cheapest access technology if prices per megabit are compared, it was four times cheaper than cable and ten times cheaper than DSL in the third quarter. When average monthly subscription prices are compared cable Internet is the cheapest option.
The future of broadband will increasingly be about fiber.

When fiber has been put in place it becomes the dominant broadband access technology in four to five years, at the cost of cable and DSL.

“DSL is going to have a really hard time, and we will see a gradual erosion of its market share,” said Johnson


This article was extracted from http://www.itnewsafrica.com/?p=1684. Should you require further clarification, please visit the respective website.

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Vodafone buys stake in Vodacom

Vodafone has finally released details of its anticipated plan to acquire an additional 15 per cent stake in South Africa’s Vodacom from Telkom SA, in a plan which was first announced last month.

The deal, which is estimated at R22.5 billion (US$2.47 billion), is set to increase Vodafone’s shareholding in Vodacom Group from the current 50 to 65 per cent.

The deal will also see Vodacom, South Africa’s largest cellular network, being registered in the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, while the remaining 35 per cent will be demerged by Telkom to its shareholders.

The Government of South Africa has also agreed that it will retain a minimum shareholding of 10 per cent in Vodacom Group for a period of 12 months after the listing on the JSE.

Vodafone has also committed to maintain the Vodacom brand-name and that Vodacom will be the exclusive investment vehicle through which it will make acquisitions in sub-Saharan Africa (excluding Ghana and Kenya where Vodafone is already present) - which will ensure that the South African government can benefit from any gains.
The transaction will be financed through existing cash resources and committed debt facilities.

The acquisition is subject to, among other conditions, approval by 75% of Telkom’s shareholders and is conditional upon Vodacom Group being listed on the JSE and Telkom demerging the remaining 35% of Vodacom Group to Telkom’s shareholders.

Telkom’s two largest shareholders, the Government of South Africa and the Public Investment Corporation Limited, owning a combined 58%, have irrevocably committed to vote in favour of the transaction and will become significant shareholders in Vodacom Group following the completion of the transaction.



This article was extracted from http://www.itnewsafrica.com/?p=1666. Should you require further clarification, please visit the respective website.

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Econet Wireless Zimbabwe Discontinues The Post-paid package.

Econet Wireless Zimbabwe says it will next week discontinue all contract lines (post-paid packages), in yet another sign of Zimbabwe’s economic freefall.

"Econet Wireless would like to advise its valued Business Partna subscribers that the current postpaid billing system has long gone past its life span and the implementation of a new billing system has not be possible due to foreign currency constraints.


"To avoid shutting down, we regret to advise that Business Partna customers will be migrated to the prepaid platform with effect from Monday 10th November 2008," said Econet in a statement to its contract customers.

Officials who spoke to RadioVOP on condition of anonymity, said the discontinuation of contract lines is only a temporary measure aimed at cushioning the company from the harsh economic climate.

"Once a new billing system is in place, due notice will be given to our valued customers. The prepaid system is however, characterized by congestion," said Econet.



This article was extracted from http://www.radiovop.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4329&Itemid=756. Should you require further clarification, please visit the respective website.


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Who Killed the VoIP Revolution?

“VoIP is dead,” Skype General Manager of Voice and Video Jonathan Christensen declared at an industry conference a few weeks ago. He spoke figuratively, of course, but he may well have been right. While Voice-Over-Internet Protocol proponents had long promised a decade of creative destruction, they themselves appear to have become the victims.


The full potential of a technology is not always realized once it converges with market forces. In this case, the gravitational pull of the incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs) has always proven difficult to resist. Most of the VoIP industry, while loudly proclaiming the SIP era as the beginning of the end for monopoly communications, secretly courted the incumbents in hopes of profiting from replacing their long-amortized investments in the fixed-line business. By tying their fortunes to the whimsy of the ILECs, many of the upstarts suffered, destroying billions of dollars in shareholder value in the process.

Recently PulverMedia, which spurred the VoIP crowd and rode its financial crest, shut its doors amid a swirl of controversy. As of this writing, Sonus Networks, once a high flier at $95 per share in 2000, trades at about $2.29. Even Cisco has thrown in the towel, discontinuing its BTS series of softswitches (which provide the routing logic for VoIP networks). These dismal stories perfectly mirror the ride of the VoIP industry in general.

The outlook was once a lot better. In 1999, with the ratification of the SIP protocol specification by the IETF, advocates who wanted to tear apart the monopolies that dominated telecom started to beat their war drums. Following conventional wisdom that the Internet democratizes and deleverages any market into which it enters, it was easy to convince investors to pour billions into VoIP products and companies. Regulators seemed to support that theory, too, sealing the deal with the FCC’s so-called “Pulver Order,” which defended the VoIP industry from over-reaching regulation and tarifing.

The anticipated period of “creative destruction” came, all right. It began in 2001 with the smiting of the competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) and long-distance competitors, who had not yet even had time to embrace VoIP, by predatory pricing from the incumbents. It continued with the shift from fixed voice lines to wireless phones, as evidenced by the drop in landlines . More recently, the guns have been turned toward the VoIP equipment vendors that begat the revolution in the first place.

So what happened? What clipped the wings of so many VoIP hopefuls can be boiled down to five things:

Death by Deliberation: The incumbents and cablecos were identified as early targets for the equipment vendors, however their engineers quibbled about curbside protocols and QOS and fiddled with VoIP in the labs, delaying launches by years — far outside of the fundraising cycle of most of the VoIP startups.
Competition Attrition: The implosion and autopsy of WorldCom signaled to most of the industry that being a competitor in telecom is not a healthy business. Those high prices were largely arbitrary, and as soon as the market pressured incumbents to reduce them, they did.
Evolution vs. Revolution: Companies like Nortel, Siemens and Ericsson rank among the top VoIP equipment vendors today, not startups. Technologists completely underestimated the sway and leverage that the traditional vendors held over their customers.
SIP in a Box: SIP might be an open protocol, but networks were built proprietarily and have not been bridged together. Most telecom services still communicate with each other via public switching, meaning that the wonderful possibilities that SIP might enable are limited by the capabilities of the plain old telephone system.
Landline Decline: Even as networks were evolving, the number of landlines around the globe was shrinking. People found more convenient ways to communicate via wireless, SMS, instant messaging or pervasive email.
VoIP technology has clearly been successful in making inroads into traditional telecom networks, but in doing so, the revolution that SIP in particular, and VoIP in general, enables has been largely cast aside and the entire industry has coalesced in a race to the bottom. With this revolution went the volume of equipment and software sales that could have revitalized the supplier business and stimulated more innovation.

Of course, while the telecom industry was eating itself alive, a plucky little company from Luxembourg called Skype delivered on VoIP’s promise by almost completely ignoring the Public Switched Telephone Network, not to mention the pundits and experts that cling desperately to SIP’s potential. The point of Christensen’s superpoke at what’s left of the telecom business is that Skype has been successful because it threw away the playbook, ignoring the obsessions of so-called telecom experts and focusing instead on solving the practical needs of everyday users.

Tens of millions of people use Skype’s network today for text messaging, file-sharing, videoconferencing — and, yes, voice calling. All of these services are made decidedly more convenient because of presence — you can see who’s there before you contact them and use that information to choose what the most appropriate means of communication should be. And with less than a $40 million investment (prior to eBay’s rather more substantial buy-in), Skype’s user growth has outpaced the entire rest of the consumer VoIP business combined.

The bottleneck for innovation appears to have been Alexander Graham Bell’s (no relation) PTSN — the plain old telephone system. By going after low-hanging fruit and forcing their innovations to be defined within the walls of the PSTN, the vast majority of VoIP companies voluntarily muzzled their own revolution and ultimately cost their investors billions.

By Ian Andrew Bell
Ian Andrew Bell is a reformed telecom executive, and creator of the team management service rosterbot.com




This article was extracted from http://gigaom.com/2008/11/02/who-killed-the-voip-revolution/. Should you require further clarification, please visit the respective website.



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'Dial-up is dead'

iBurst is again aggressively targeting the dial-up market; this time with a competition aimed at convincing South Africans to build an advertising campaign.

The company is asking South Africans to build an original television, radio or print advert with the central theme of dial-up being passé. “The idea is to delve into the minds of South Africans and find out how they think about broadband versus dial-up,” says Callia Doucas, iBurst's marketing head.


“The adverts should focus on the advantages of iBurst broadband over dial-up connectivity,” she says.

Participants must register and submit their entries on the iBurst competition Web site, www.iburstcompetition.co.za, by 31 December.

According to Doucas, the best adverts will be selected according to the number of views and ratings on the Web site. The winning ads may be broadcast nationally in March 2009. Winners will also receive a Macbook Pro, valued at R50 000, and iBurst connectivity for two years.

“This is an opportunity for all South Africans with creative flair to get their ideas seen nationally. The adverts need not be professionally created. Just a quick video taken on a cellphone, or a sketched print advert would suffice,” adds Doucas.

Target market

iBurst has been targeting the dial-up user directly over the last few months. The company's latest campaign offers to replace dial-up modems for R200. The company also disposes of the dial-up technology.

World Wide Worx strategy MD Steven Ambrose says dial-up is definitely a dying connectivity option. By December 2007, Internet service providers reported there were 908 000 dial-up users in the country.

“We predict that by the end of December 2008, there will be 800 000,” adds Ambrose.

World Wide Worx is completing this year's research on connectivity and will soon release more recent figures.

iBurst has a subscriber base of around 50 000 users, making the dial-up fraternity a lucrative opportunity for the company. “iBurst is targeting the dial-up market and the company's offering does make sense for them,” adds Ambrose.

He says the objective consensus is that broadband is cheaper than dial-up, even if users are only online for an hour a week. “It doesn't mean that broadband is cheap, it just means that dial-up isn't cheaper.”

Ambrose notes that broadband has been fraught with confusing contract options and upfront costs, whereas dial-up is a more controlled connectivity option. “While it is a dying option, dial-up does have utility. Especially for those who just check mail and do Internet banking. This is a good marketing space for iBurst.”

BY CANDICE JONES


This article was extracted from http://www.itweb.co.za/sections/telecoms/2008/0811041036.asp?S=Innovations&A=INV&O=FRGN. Should you require further clarification, please visit the respective website.

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