Social Marketing & Digital Agency

Skype’s international phone-calling traffic has accelerated at a time when international telephone traffic has slowed, according to a new report by TeleGeography.

Skype traffic has been soaring despite the background of slowing growth by
conventional phone companies, according to the report. Where international
calling volumes from telephones was growing at a compounded annual rate of
15% for the past 25 years, over the past two years it has slowed down to
only 8%. Skype however has seen its international cheap calls volume sky
rocket.

In a press statement from TeleGeography, analyst Stephan Beckert commented,
“Demand for international voice has been remarkably robust, but it’s
clearly not recession-proof”.

However, the statement went on to highlight that Skype was managing to very successfully buck the trend, with on-net international Skype-to-Skype traffic growing by 51% in 2008, and a projected growth of 63% in 2009, to a massive 54 billion minutes.

“The volume of traffic routed via Skype is tremendous,” said Beckert.

This increase in international calling minutes experienced by Skype has
brought its market share up to 12% in 2009, and made Skype the “largest
provider of cross border communications in the world, by far”, according to
Beckert.

The success experienced by Skype can be further demonstrated by a recent
company journal report which showed that on the 19th January 2010 the
service experienced an all-time record number of concurrent logged on users
with over 22 and a quarter million clients signed in to Skype at the same
time. This record comes only shortly after the previous record of 21.5
million concurrent users was logged the previous Monday.

Sunbelt Software, a provider of Windows security software, today announced the top 10 most prevalent malware threats for the month of January 2010.

The report, compiled from monthly scans performed by Sunbelt’s award-winning anti-malware solution, VIPRE® Antivirus+ Antispyware, and its antispyware tool, CounterSpy®, is a service of SunbeltLabs™.

In January, the malware landscape remained remarkably similar to December, according to Sunbelt Software ThreatNet statistics. The top seven detections were the same as December, but in a slightly different order. In December and January, six of the top 10 detections were Trojan horse programs.

Trojan.Win32.Generic!BT – a generic detection for Trojans that comprised nearly one quarter (23.15 percent) of all the malware found. It remained in the top position for the third month in a row, growing by nearly 20 percent
from 18.69 percent of all detections in December. It is a detection that includes many downloaders associated with scareware or rogue security products.

After holding the top spot on the list for most of 2009, the password-stealing Trojan-Spy.Win32. Zbot.gen held the second position on the list for the third consecutive month, decreasing from 6.23 to 4.91 percent of all detections.

“I think we can expect to see Trojan horse programs continue to be the top detections for the foreseeable future,” said Michael St. Neitzel, Sunbelt Software vice president of Threat Research. “Trojans used to download and install a wide variety of other malware and those are the real moneymakers for the bad guys.”

Other Trojans in the top 10 were:

– Trojan.Win32.Generic!SB.0
– Trojan.Win32.Malware
– Trojan.ASF.Wimad (v)
– Trojan.HTML.FakeAlert.a (v)

Meanwhile, three new detections moved onto this month’s top 10 list.
Virtumonde – a general description of an adware program with many
versions of pop up advertising – constituted 1.23 percent of overall
detections. Packed.Win32.TDSS.aa.3 (v) – a sophisticated rootkit and
Trojan that is used primarily to redirect search engine results – made up
1.21 percent. Finally, Trojan.HTML.FakeAlert.a (v) – a detection for an
HTML file which replaces a desktop background and works with other rogue
malware – made up just under one percent of all detections.

The top 10 results represent the number of times a particular malware
infection was detected during VIPRE and CounterSpy scans that report back
to ThreatNet, Sunbelt’s community of opt-in users. These threats are
classified as moderate to severe based on method of installation among
other criteria established by SunbeltLabs. The majority of these threats
propagate through stealth installations or social engineering.

The top 10 most prevalent malware threats for the month of January are:

1. Trojan.Win32.Generic!BT 23.15%
2. Trojan-Spy.Win32.Zbot.gen 4.91%
3. Exploit.PDF-JS.Gen (v) 4.55%
4. Trojan.Win32.Generic!SB.0 2.40%
5.   Trojan.Win32.Malware 1.93%
6. Trojan.ASF.Wimad (v) 1.92%
7. INF.Autorun (v) 1.46%
8. Virtumonde 1.23%
9. Packed.Win32.TDSS.aa.3 (v) 1.21%
10. Trojan.HTML.FakeAlert.a (v) 0.98%

14 January 2010

A new mobile phone technology called near field communication (NFC) will begin to replace traditional wallets and purses from 2011, according to a new research report published today.

Banks and mobile network operators will both be seeking to make money from
the introduction of the new mobile payments technology, the report
predicts, and are set to go head to head in a bid to gain control of the
market.

“NFC technology will be used to replace everything from credit cards and
loyalty cards to bus and train tickets, library cards, door keys and even
cash,” says Sarah Clark, author of ‘NFC: The Road to Commercial
Deployment’. “What hasn’t yet been decided, however, is who will win the
battle to provide consumers with their new hi-tech mobile wallets.”

The UK, France, United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Taiwan and Korea will be
the first countries to get the new mobile wallets, the report predicts. The
US, Canada, Spain, Germany, Italy, Norway, the Czech Republic, Romania and
Australia are also expected to be early adopters of NFC.

Businesses ranging from retail and travel to fast food, consumer goods,
tourism and entertainment are all expected to be affected by the arrival of
NFC services. Government and educational service providers will also be
impacted by its arrival.

“Decisions made in 2010 will be critical in determining which mobile
network operators, which banks, which industry suppliers and which service
providers become the leaders in the field,” she adds. “Ultimately, only two
or three companies in each country will succeed in building a major new
business providing NFC services to businesses and consumers. The winners
could be banks or mobile operators, or even a new entrant to the market.”

Consumers with NFC-enabled phones will be able to simply touch their phone
to a ‘smart’ poster or product label containing an RFID chip to sign up for
a loyalty programme, collect a money-off coupon, download a trailer for a
new movie, access the latest travel information or go straight to a
product’s website to read customer ratings and reviews and compare prices.

Social networks will also get a major boost. With an NFC phone, you can
friend someone online when you meet them in the real world by simply
touching your phones together. Or touch your phone to a smart poster as you
go into a restaurant to automatically update your Facebook status and get
an offer coupon from the venue as a thank you for telling your friends
you’re there.

Commuters will be able to store their travel pass on their phone and mobile
versions of airline boarding cards, hotel room keys and even passports will
make it quicker and easier to get from place to place. Paying bills will
become much simpler, too. Simply touch two NFC phones together to transfer
money to a friend, buy a drink or pay for a service.

“No more rummaging around for the right change, card, keys or paperwork and
no more texting your location to your friends — with NFC everything can be
handled by your mobile device,” says Clark. “And, of course, NFC is a
highly secure technology. Consumers will be able to instantly lock all the
mobile wallet services on their phone if it is lost or stolen and then get
them automatically transferred onto a new phone as soon as it arrives. They
will also be able to use their phone to make payments even when the battery
is flat.”

Interestingly, this is a subject our digital techno blonde, Claire, covered in depth for WTF magazine in 2008, as Japan has been using this technology for a number of years now – see here for ‘Going Japanese‘ article.

According to recent research by content management association AIIM, on average 51% of the paper documents scanned by user organisations are born digital, having been output directly from a computer application.

The survey also found that 25% of scanned documents are photocopied before
being sent for scanning, and that only 31% are destroyed after scanning,
indicating a reluctance by users and organisations to lose sight of mission
critical documents. On balance, however, the number of users who reported a
decrease in the volume of paper and photocopies as a result of scanning was
the same as the number who reported an increase.

The AIIM report compares strategies for outsourced, centralised and
distributed scanning, and concludes that there is a move back to
centralised scanning operations, along with a greater investment in capture
and recognition software to automate data capture and document indexing
processes. Although outsourcing delivers cost and management benefits,
quality of indexing and difficulty of integration back into electronic
archives are given as the biggest disadvantages.

Doug Miles, Director of Market Intelligence for AIIM, comments, “We have
seen a steady increase in the use of scanning and capture as an input to
business processes, with 42% of documents now being scanned-to-process
rather than scanned-to-archive. Proximity to the process, and the level of
integration with other enterprise systems become more important in these
applications. Users find that distributed processing with departmental
scanners and MFPs improves ownership by the process owners, but office
staff and knowledge workers need training and encouragement to ensure
accurate indexing.”

The AIIM survey also found that 46% of users report payback on their
scanning and capture investments within 12 months, with two-thirds seeing
returns within 18 months. These returns are consistent across many types of
content and process, with invoices, contracts and application forms being
the most popular.
Based on over 850 responses, the AIIM research report is entitled
“Capture: local, central, outsource – what’s working best?”  Part of
the AIIM Industry Watch series, the full report is free to download from
the AIIM website. It is underwritten by Abbyy, Autonomy, EMC Corporation,
Epson, Image Source, and Visioneer.

After numerous attempts to shut the illegal file sharing and downloads website Pirate Bay, more and more file sharing and illegal download sites are starting up.  A huge increase in these types of sites has been reported in the third quarter of 2009 already.

Net security firm McAfee reports that a 300 per cent increase in file sharing sites that offer music and films has been accompanied by a sharp increase in associated malware-themed scams. Some of the newly created sites are littered with ruses designed to trick users into downloading various strains of malware.

A spokesperson from McAfee commented: “In the days prior to the shutdown anonymizers indexed and relayed the data to users who might be blocked. Open-source code was available to anyone who wanted to help with redistribution of the bit torrents. This was a true “cloud computing” effort, as the masses stepped up to make this database of torrents (legal, infringed, and malicious) available to others.”