Data Broker

A data broker, also called an information broker or information reseller. It collects personal information about consumers and sells that information to other organizations. Data brokers can collect information about consumers from a variety of sources both public and private sources including courthouse records, website cookies, loyalty card programs and promotional events. Typically, brokers create profiles of individuals for marketing purposes and sell them to businesses who want to target their advertisements and special offers.

Currently, there is no legislation that requires a data broker to share the information they have gathered with the consumers they have profiled. In an effort to provide transparency, however, the data broker Acxiom has created a web site called Aboutthedata.com. The site allows consumers to register, see what information Acxiom has collected about them and correct data that is wrong. Critics maintain that the website is just another way for the company to gather more data.

Data brokers may refer to themselves as being database marketers or consumer data analysts.

Denial of Service Attacks

Denial of Service Attacks (DoS Attacks) involve flooding a computer with more requests that it can handle. This causes the computer or web server to crash and results in authorized users being unable to access the service offered by the computer.

Another variation to a typical denial of service attack is known as a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack wherein the perpetrators are many and are geographically widespread.

Incident 1 

A series of distributed denial of service attacks in February 2000 crippled many popular websites including yahoo.com, amazon.com and cnn.com.

Incident 2 

A series of more than 125 separate but coordinated denial of service attacks hit the cyber infrastructure of Estonia in early 2007. The attacks were apparently connected with protests against the Estonian government's decision to remove a Soviet-era war memorial from the capital city. It is suspected the attacks were carried out by Russian hackers. The attacks lasted several days.

Web Jacking

Just like any conventional hijacking of plane or vehicle is done, similarly web jacking means taking over control of a website. The purpose may be like political or monetary. This can be done by someone by cracking the password and later changing it of a website control. The actual owner of the website does not have control anymore. There are many ways in which a hacker may get the credentials, the most common ways is using a cracking software to guess password.

In an incident reported in the USA, the owner of a hobby website for children received an e-mail informing her that a group of hackers had gained control over her website. They demanded a ransom of 1 million dollars from her. The owner, a schoolteacher, did not take the threat seriously. It was 3 days later that she came to know, following many telephonic calls from all over the country, that the hackers had web jacked her website. Subsequently, they had altered a portion of the website which was entitled "How to have fun with goldfish". In all the places where it had been mentioned, they have replaced the word 'goldfish' with the word 'piranhas'. Piranhas are tiny but extremely dangerous flesh-eating fish. Many children has visited the website and had believed the contents of the website. These unfortunate children followed the instructions, tried to play with piranhas, which they bought from pet shops, and were very seriously injured.

Preventing e-mail address forgery.

Spammers can forge, or "spoof," a domain's From email address to make their spam look like it came from someone in your domain. To help prevent this, it is recommended that mail sent from a domain to be authenticated.

Authenticating mail from your domain can be done in two ways:

1. by adding a digital signature to your messages that conforms to the "DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM)" and 

2. by creating SPF records

DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) lets an organization take responsibility for a message that is in transit.  The organization is a handler of the message, either as its originator or as an intermediary. Their reputation is the basis for evaluating whether to trust the message for further handling, such as delivery. Technically DKIM provides a method for validating a domain name identity that is associated with a message through cryptographic authentication.

More details can be found at http://www.dkim.org

SPF (Sender Policy Framework) is a sender authentication method through which the administrator can specify which hosts are allowed to send email on behalf of a domain. The sending domain adds a specially formatted record into its DNS zone file identifying all authorized mail servers. The receiving mail server checks the sending domain's DNS zone file to see if the IP address from which the message originates matches one of the authorized IP addresses.