The Times: Tech column - Geocaching/honeypots
By David Rowan
IT IS A blazing hot Saturday afternoon on the Thames-side footpath abutting the National Theatre in London, and the global positioning network of satellites is guiding your columnist excitedly towards a bench: the one located by a handheld GPS device at N 51 degrees 30.513 W 000 degrees 06.648. Sure enough, hidden beneath the bench is a 35mm film canister containing two pencils and a sheet of paper. It might not mean much to the bemused passers-by, but in the sport of geocaching this little baby represents treasure.
Ever since President Clinton opened up GPS technology to civilian use three years ago, a new sport has evolved among owners of the handheld locator units. Using the internet, participants advertise the co-ordinates of objects that they have "cached", or hidden, and set others the challenge of finding them, whether on remote mountainsides or high-rise rooftops. The finder is entitled to remove an item from the cache and replace it with another, and is expected to log the encounter on paper and online. And as GPS units have fallen in price to little more than £100, geocaching has become an increasingly mainstream sport.
According to geocaching.com, there are 59,984 active caches in 177 countries. It is, according to the site's Seattle-based founder, Jeremy Irish, "the sport where you are the search engine" - and, as you would expect from such a geek friendly pastime, it has already spawned its own slang. A "geomuggle" is, Harry Potter-style, someone who just doesn't get the magic, the accolade "FTF" reveals that you were first to find a cache and a "hitchhiker" is an item placed in one cache with the instruction that it be taken to another. Irish estimates that 250,000 people are playing, and UK-specific sites such as www.geocacheuk.com suggest that a few thousand, at least, are active in Britain.
What is most exciting about this sport's rapid rise is that it represents a grassroots response to a newly available technology, rather than anything dreamt up by a corporate marketing department. Still, the mainstream is catching up. On Saturday Hampshire County Council is organising what it claims is "the world's first public geocaching event". But don't expect me to tell you where it is, beyond pointing you towards N 51 degrees 03.625 W 001 degrees 22.849 ...
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IF YOU ARE looking for a lucrative career among friendly, helpful colleagues, you could try that of credit-card fraudster. That seems to be the conclusion of a worrying investigation by the Honeynet Project (www.honeynet.org), a non profit research group that monitors the net's darker corners. Its researchers recently examined a dozen internet relay chat channels and related websites where credit-card numbers and other personally identifiable data have been changing hands in large volumes. They found an open and helpful community of card thieves who went out of their way to welcome newcomers - even giving away valid card numbers to get them started.
They also discovered a worrying level of automation, including "bots" programmed to search the net for vulnerable merchant sites and to validate cards, and evidence that corrupt merchants were offering to sell large batches of card numbers in exchange for a percentage of the take. "By presenting their activities as a lifestyle choice rather than criminal fraud, members of the carding community entice others to join them," the report concludes. "They pose a growing threat to the financial community, online merchants and individual cardholders."
With identity theft and card fraud on the rise, it may no longer be enough to rely on the credit-card providers' insistence that their security systems are adequate.
(The Times, July 15 2003)
IT IS A blazing hot Saturday afternoon on the Thames-side footpath abutting the National Theatre in London, and the global positioning network of satellites is guiding your columnist excitedly towards a bench: the one located by a handheld GPS device at N 51 degrees 30.513 W 000 degrees 06.648. Sure enough, hidden beneath the bench is a 35mm film canister containing two pencils and a sheet of paper. It might not mean much to the bemused passers-by, but in the sport of geocaching this little baby represents treasure.
Ever since President Clinton opened up GPS technology to civilian use three years ago, a new sport has evolved among owners of the handheld locator units. Using the internet, participants advertise the co-ordinates of objects that they have "cached", or hidden, and set others the challenge of finding them, whether on remote mountainsides or high-rise rooftops. The finder is entitled to remove an item from the cache and replace it with another, and is expected to log the encounter on paper and online. And as GPS units have fallen in price to little more than £100, geocaching has become an increasingly mainstream sport.
According to geocaching.com, there are 59,984 active caches in 177 countries. It is, according to the site's Seattle-based founder, Jeremy Irish, "the sport where you are the search engine" - and, as you would expect from such a geek friendly pastime, it has already spawned its own slang. A "geomuggle" is, Harry Potter-style, someone who just doesn't get the magic, the accolade "FTF" reveals that you were first to find a cache and a "hitchhiker" is an item placed in one cache with the instruction that it be taken to another. Irish estimates that 250,000 people are playing, and UK-specific sites such as www.geocacheuk.com suggest that a few thousand, at least, are active in Britain.
What is most exciting about this sport's rapid rise is that it represents a grassroots response to a newly available technology, rather than anything dreamt up by a corporate marketing department. Still, the mainstream is catching up. On Saturday Hampshire County Council is organising what it claims is "the world's first public geocaching event". But don't expect me to tell you where it is, beyond pointing you towards N 51 degrees 03.625 W 001 degrees 22.849 ...
++++
IF YOU ARE looking for a lucrative career among friendly, helpful colleagues, you could try that of credit-card fraudster. That seems to be the conclusion of a worrying investigation by the Honeynet Project (www.honeynet.org), a non profit research group that monitors the net's darker corners. Its researchers recently examined a dozen internet relay chat channels and related websites where credit-card numbers and other personally identifiable data have been changing hands in large volumes. They found an open and helpful community of card thieves who went out of their way to welcome newcomers - even giving away valid card numbers to get them started.
They also discovered a worrying level of automation, including "bots" programmed to search the net for vulnerable merchant sites and to validate cards, and evidence that corrupt merchants were offering to sell large batches of card numbers in exchange for a percentage of the take. "By presenting their activities as a lifestyle choice rather than criminal fraud, members of the carding community entice others to join them," the report concludes. "They pose a growing threat to the financial community, online merchants and individual cardholders."
With identity theft and card fraud on the rise, it may no longer be enough to rely on the credit-card providers' insistence that their security systems are adequate.
(The Times, July 15 2003)
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