UK 'losing fight' against e-crime

30 July 2013 Last updated at 10:45 ET

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David Edmundson-Bird successfully proved he was the victim of e-crime

The UK must do more to stop online fraud and deter state-sponsored cyber-espionage or risk losing the fight against e-crime, MPs have warned.

The Home Affairs Select Committee said much low-level internet-based financial crime was falling into a "black hole" and was not reported to the police.

The MPs said more officers should be trained in digital crime detection and e-crime experts protected from cuts.

The Home Office said the authorities must "keep pace" with criminals.

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The internet is a "reasonably safe place" as long as people take "sensible precautions" - that was the conclusion of the Science and Technology Committee in its report on e-crime in January 2012.

The committee said the government should focus on raising awareness of how to stay safe online.

How, then, has another group of MPs - on the Home Affairs Committee - produced such sharply contrasting findings?

There's nothing to suggest that internet safety has nose-dived in the 18 months between the two reports, but it may be that the Home Affairs Committee heard more worrying evidence about the response of the authorities to e-crime.

Perhaps the Home Affairs MPs also hoped that their vivid use of language ("war" and "black hole") would prompt ministers into action.

The message has certainly been sent - though more analysis and less hyperbole might yield better results.

Publishing its first report on the subject, the cross-party committee said e-crime took various forms, did not recognise national borders and could be committed "at almost any time or in any place".

'Off the hook'

It called for a dedicated cyber-espionage team to respond to attacks, many of which are believed to be backed by foreign governments because they are so sophisticated.

Offences range from attacks on computer networks and the use of viruses to steal data to the use of cyberspace to facilitate traditional crimes such as forgery, sabotage, drug smuggling and people trafficking.

The committee said it was worried by the evidence it had heard during its inquiry about the UK's e-crime fighting capability.

It said it had been told by Adrian Leppard, deputy assistant commissioner at the City of London Police, that up to a quarter of the UK's 800 specialist internet crime officers could be lost due to budget cuts.

This was despite evidence the UK was a prime target for many of the 1,300 criminal gangs specialising in fraud.

A quarter of the gangs, many of which are based in eastern Europe and Russia, use the internet as their principal means of deception.

The MPs said police cutbacks came on top of proposed 10% cuts to the budget of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre.

"At a time when fraud and e-crime is going up, the capability of the country to address it is going down," the report concluded.

"Ministers have acknowledged the increasing threat of e-crime but it is clear that sufficient funding and resources have not been allocated to the law enforcement responsible for tackling it."

As well as calling for a cyber-espionage team, the report's recommendations include:

• Requiring banks to report all e-fraud, however small, to the police
• Obliging web firms to explain data security tools to new users
• Prosecutors to review sentencing guidance for e-crimes
• Increased funding for European e-crime co-operation
• Mandatory code of conduct for removal of indecent material
• New body to report on and remove online terrorist content

Keith Vaz, the Labour MP who chairs the committee, said the UK's response to e-crime was too "fractured".

He told BBC 5 live: "Our country is the number one target for gangs in 25 countries."

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Keith Vaz, MP: "This is a more serious threat than a nuclear attack"

He added: "It's much easier and more lucrative to steal on the internet than it is to go out and rob a bank.

"These are real e-wars. At the moment we are not winning the e-wars."

Mr Vaz said the gangs committing e-crimes were "predominantly" from eastern Europe, including European Union countries such as Romania.

The UK's eavesdropping centre GCHQ suggested earlier this year that 80% of cyber-attacks could be prevented by better management of information online.

The Police Federation of England and Wales said the MPs' report was further evidence that recent figures showing a 10% fall in recorded crime last year were "misleading".

Javed Khan, chief executive of the charity Victim Support, called the findings "worrying", adding: "E-criminals cannot be allowed to get ahead of our police and their partners."

And Matthew Fell, Matthew Fell, of the CBI business group, questioned the need to "force businesses to report a cyber attack as soon as it happens", adding that the they "should instead be focusing on fighting the attack privately".

He said reporting could even prove "counterproductive" and put firms "at greater risk".

The government announced increased funding for cyber-security in 2010, while a single National Cybercrime Unit will be formed later this year as part of the new National Crime Agency.

Deputy Chief Constable Peter Goodman, who speaks for the Association of Chief Police officers on e-crime, said the new unit would bring a "real step change in our response to e-crime".

A Home Office spokesman said: "Crime is at record low levels and this government is taking action to tackle the cyber-threat, investing more than £850m through the national cyber-security programme to develop and maintain cutting-edge capabilities."

He said the new cybercrime unit would "target the most serious offenders and provide enhanced intelligence for Ceop so they can protect even more children from harm".

"But we know we need to keep pace with criminals as they target the web and so we continue to consider ways to ensure the police and security services have access to communications data," the spokesman added.

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UK blocks car key hack revelation

29 July 2013 Last updated at 08:06 ET

A High Court judge has blocked three security researchers from publishing details of how to crack a car immobilisation system.

German car maker Volkswagen and French defence group Thales obtained the interim ruling after arguing that the information could be used by criminals.

The technology is used by several car manufacturers.

The academics had planned to present the information at a conference in August.

The three researchers are Flavio Garcia, a computer science lecturer at the University of Birmingham, and Baris Ege and Roel Verdult, security researchers at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands.

"The University of Birmingham is disappointed with the judgement which did not uphold the defence of academic freedom and public interest, but respects the decision," said a spokeswoman.

"It has decided to defer publication of the academic paper in any form while additional technical and legal advice is obtained given the continuing litigation. The university is therefore unable to comment further at this stage."

Radboud University Nijmegen said it found the ban "incomprehensible".

"The publication in no way describes how to easily steal a car, as additional and different information is needed for this to be possible," said a spokeswoman.

"The researchers informed the chipmaker nine months before the intended publication - November 2012 - so that measures could be taken. The Dutch government considers six months to be a reasonable notification period for responsible disclosure. The researchers have insisted from the start that the chipmaker inform its own clients."

Neither VW nor Thales was able to provide comment.

The ruling was issued on 25 June, but the case only gained public attention following an article in the Guardian.

Two-day hack

The presentation - entitled Dismantling Megamos Crypto: Wirelessly Lock-picking a Vehicle Immobiliser - is still listed on the website of the Usenix Security Symposium, which will be held in Washington next month.

Megamos Crypto refers to a transponder built into car keys which uses RFID (radio-frequency identification) to transmit an encrypted signal to the vehicles. This deactivates a system which otherwise prevents their engines from starting.

VW introduced the technology in the late 1990s and it is also used by Honda and Fiat among others.

The researchers said they had obtained a software program from the internet which contained the algorithm devised by Thales to provide the security feature. They said it had been on the net since 2009.

The researchers said they had then discovered a weakness in the code meaning that it could be compromised, and added that there was a strong public interest that the information be disclosed to ensure the problem was addressed.

However, VW and Thales argued that the algorithm was confidential information, and whoever had released it on the net had probably done so illegally. Furthermore, they said, there was good reason to believe that criminal gangs would try to take advantage of the revelation to steal vehicles.

The researchers argued that this risk was overblown since car thieves would need to run a computer program for about two days to make use of the exploit in each case.

They said that removing the sections which VW and Thales wanted expunged would mean their paper would have to be peer reviewed a second time, and they would miss their slot at the conference as a consequence. And they argued that their right to publish was covered by freedom of speech safeguards in the European Convention on Human Rights.

However, the judge ruled that, pending a full trial, the details should be withheld.

Tom Ohta, an associate at the law firm Bristows - which was not involved in the case - said the way the researchers discovered the flaw proved their undoing.

"An important factor here was that the academics had not obtained the software from a legitimate source, having downloaded it from an unauthorised website," he said.

"This persuaded the court that the underlying algorithm was confidential in nature, and bearing in mind the public interest of not having security flaws potentially abused by criminal gangs, led to the injunction."

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Dating profiles sale investigated

29 July 2013 Last updated at 06:06 ET

A total of 10,000 online dating profiles has been sold to the BBC's Panorama programme, many of which were fake.

The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has said it will investigate the sale.

The ICO said the sale of this information could be "a significant breach of data protection principles".

The profile seller Edgars Apalais has denied that people did not give consent for their contact details to be shared.

The programme was sent photographs and lists of names, email addresses, dates of birth and details of sexual orientation by the website Usdate. Some profiles included photographs of celebrities such as Brad Pitt, Michael Caine and the TV chef Rick Stein.

Some of the contact details sold were genuine. The email addresses of academics, a House of Lords life peer and BBC employees were included on the list. All of these individuals told the programme that they had never used a dating website.

'Money-making scam'

Gerald Masterson tried online dating a couple of years ago but said he did not meet anyone and stopped using the websites.

He was surprised to learn that his personal details had been sold to Panorama as part of the bulk purchase of fake profiles.

"I am angry and feel they have taken my identity…. I feel it's just a money-making scam," he said.

It is a breach of data protection law if someone sells your information without consent and if the information is inaccurate. The material sold to Panorama appears to meet both criteria.

The man who sold the BBC these profiles calls himself Edgars Apalais. Panorama tracked him down to the Dominican Republic and eventually he agreed to an interview. We secretly recorded the conversation.

He denied that people had not given their consent for their contact details, photographs or personal information to be shared.

"This is sensitive personal data. I'm very concerned to see that these lists are being sold on. You've got lists about these individuals' sexuality," said Simon Entwisle, Director of Operations at the Information Commissioner's Office, the body responsible for ensuring companies protect private data.

"If you're talking about significant numbers of names, that's a significant breach of the data protection principles potentially,"

You can watch Panorama - Tainted Love: The Dark Side of Online Dating Monday 29 July at 20:30 BST on BBC1 and then on the BBC iPlayer in the UK.

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Game players fight giant space war

29 July 2013 Last updated at 07:05 ET

One of the largest video game space battles ever seen has taken place in the Eve Online game.

For five hours on 28 July about 4,000 players took part in the epic battle between two of the game's biggest alliances.

The two sides were fighting for control of resources within several of the game's solar systems.

Time was slowed down in the virtual universe to help servers cope with the huge numbers of players and ships.

The battle pitted spaceships belonging to CFC against those from the Test Alliance in a region of space known as 6VDT. It ended in victory for CFC.

Eve Online is a detailed space simulation that sees players fly spaceships through thousands of virtual star systems, seeking resources they can use to prosper.

The resources can be found on planets and in asteroid fields or acquired through piracy or other underhand means.

Ships vary in size from small trading vessels to giant capital ships.

Erlendur Thorsteinsson, one of Eve Online's developers, confirmed in a tweet that the battle was the biggest ever seen in the game.

At its peak the battle involved 4,070 pilots and their ships.

Game time was slowed to 10% of normal to lighten the load on servers working out who was shooting at whom.

The pivotal moment in the battle took place two hours in, when CFC sent in a large fleet of capital ships - the most powerful in the game.

Their arrival prompted many members of the Test Alliance to try to flee.

By the end of the conflict thousands of ships are believed to have been destroyed.

Their destruction has a real-world cost as the game's internal currency can be bought with real money.

So far no-one has worked out the total value of the ships destroyed, but a far smaller battle earlier in 2013 laid waste to far fewer spacecraft that in total were estimated to be worth more than $15,000 (£10,000).

The giant battle was the culmination of a long campaign by CFC to force the Test Alliance out of 6VDT.

Some have speculated that it may be the only the first of a series of conflicts that seek to extinguish TEST.

"These kinds of conflicts are business as usual in Eve but this one was bigger than normal," said James Binns from the PCGamesN website.

Mr Binns said several big events had made the last few weeks in Eve absorbing to watch. During that time a giant ship was hijacked and then destroyed in a carefully co-ordinated ambush and a huge in-game corporation was disbanded and its resources stolen by a spy from a rival faction.

"It's a fascinating online world and its constant drama is nothing like any other game," he said.

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Google mulls 100 million links cull

29 July 2013 Last updated at 10:14 ET

Google has received requests to remove more than 100 million links since January 2013 for web pages deemed to be in breach of copyright laws.

That is double the number it received for the whole of 2012 and a sign that publishers are stepping up their battle against internet piracy.

Copyright holders send millions of "takedown" requests to Google every week in an attempt to make pirated material harder to access online.

But critics say the approach is wrong.

"As soon as you take down one page another pops up in its place," says Mark Mulligan, a technology analyst at Midia Consulting. "It's like playing Whac-A-Mole."

"This is because file sharing has become very decentralised - there's no central server you can just shut down."

Ernesto van der Sar, editor of Torrentfreak.com, a news site about file sharing, says: "This increase in requests is more about publishers putting pressure on Google to do more to tackle piracy. If people want to pirate they can always find a way to do so."

Copyright theft

Many of the takedown requests made under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and other national copyright laws are generated by third parties, or reporting organisations, on behalf of copyright holders.

Google began publishing all such requests in its Transparency Report in 2012 and since then the number has risen sharply, as rights holders have made greater use of the reporting system.

In the past month alone Google received requests to take down nearly 14 million links from its search results, relating to 3,200 copyright owners.

One digital content protection specialist, Degban, makes requests for about 300,000 link removals per week on behalf of clients and has asked for nearly 31 million web pages, or URLs, to be removed from Google's results so far, reports the search firm.

The website domains concerned are almost entirely person-to-person file-sharing services, such as Fenopy.eu, extratorrent.com, torrenthound.com, filestube.com and bittorrent.com.

More than half of Degban's URL requests were made on behalf of Froytal Services, a pornography producer, giving an indication of the kind of content people are sharing online.

But other major copyright owners making the most takedown requests included the BPI (British Recorded Music Industry) and its member companies, the Recording Industry Association of America, and various film studios, such as Warner Brothers.

A spokesperson for the BPI told the BBC: "BPI removes around one million links every week to music hosted on the internet without the artist's knowledge or permission.

"This process is one of many initiatives undertaken by the industry to help to create breathing space for more than 70 legal music services in the UK that strive to promote and reward musicians."

Mistakes

There are concerns that some of these takedown requests may not be accurate.

For example, Microsoft recently asked by mistake for links to its own sites to be deleted.

The embarrassing request was made on Microsoft's behalf by LeakID, an anti-piracy specialist, according to Torrentfreak.com.

Google spotted the mistake and did not delete the links, but confirmed to the BBC that almost all takedown requests it receives are acted upon.

"Mistakes are made as most of this activity is automated", says Mr Van Der Sar, "but Google is pretty good at filtering them out."

Neither Microsoft nor LeakID would comment on the mistake.

Internet piracy

Last week, a UK court ordered British internet service providers to block access to EZTV and YIFY Torrents after they were found to be conducting internet piracy on a "mass scale".

The action was brought by the Federation Against Copyright Theft (Fact) and the Motion Picture Association (MPA).

A growing number of sites accused of aiding piracy are now blocked to UK web users, including the Pirate Bay, Kickass Torrents, H33T, Fenopy, Movie2K and Download4All.

In addition, the Premier League has won a block on football streaming site FirstRow1.eu.

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Tech firms to make Blu-ray successor

29 July 2013 Last updated at 15:09 ET

Sony and Panasonic have announced plans for a successor to Blu-ray discs.

The firms say they want to develop an optical disc capable of holding at least 300 gigabytes of data by the end of 2015.

By contrast, normal dual-layer Blu-rays can only hold up to 50GB.

Sony has previously said that 4K ultra-high-definition movies - which offer four times the resolution of 1080p video - were likely to take up more than 100GB of space.

It recently launched a device that allows 4K films to be streamed over the internet, but that will be impractical for people with slow internet access or accounts with data-use limits.

4k camcorders

The tech firms do not directly refer to 4K movie sales in their press release, but rather talk of the wider "archive market".

"Optical discs have excellent properties to protect them against the environment, such as dust resistance and water resistance, and can also withstand changes in temperature and humidity when stored," they say.

"They also allow inter-generational compatibility between different formats, ensuring that data can continue to be read even as formats evolve. This makes them a robust medium for long-term storage of content."

Although the firms indicate the primary target market for the new technology will be businesses wishing to copy and preserve their data, there is also likely to be demand from the consumer market for higher capacity discs, even if sales of existing formats are waning.

The rise of streaming services such as Amazon's Lovefilm, Tesco's Blinkbox and Netflix coupled with the problem of internet piracy have eaten into disc-based television box set and movie sales.

There were 179 million disc-based videos sold in the UK last year, according to recently published figures from the British Film Institute (BFI). That marked a 14% drop on 2011.

They still accounted for more than £1.5bn of sales - more than six times the £243m generated by video-on-demand services over the same period. But VoD sales were 50% up on the year.

"For the foreseeable future, even with more advances in streaming, there will be a niche for discs," Russ Crupnick, a media analyst at consultants NPD told the BBC.

"But how large that is going to be is hard to say because it is going to be more about the collector and less about every day usage."

The demand for extra storage is also likely to be fuelled by the public's ability to generate its own ultra-high-definition footage.

JVC, Sony and Panasonic have all shown off prototype camcorders which they say will be targeted at the "prosumer" market, while GoPro already offers a budget option, albeit one that only records the format at 15 frames per second.

"The cheapest way to store lots of this material long term is going to be on an optical disc rather than a solid state drive in your laptop or tablet, or on SD cards," said Paul O'Donovan, digital video expert at the tech advisory firm Gartner.

"And they are more convenient if you want to send the video you shot to somebody.

"Imagine trying to send a 300 gigabyte file over the internet - it would take ages."

Special triple-layer 100GB BDXL Blu-ray discs already exist, offering an interim solution, and quad-level 128GB versions have also been promised. However, neither can be read by a normal player.

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Jurors jailed for contempt of court

29 July 2013 Last updated at 14:47 ET

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Attorney General Dominic Grieve: "Ignoring the judge's instructions is unacceptable behaviour"

Two jurors have each been jailed for two months for contempt of court after one posted a comment on Facebook and the other researched a case online.

Kasim Davey, 21, of London, wrote a strongly-worded Facebook message during the trial of a man for sex offences.

The High Court ruled he and Joseph Beard, 29, who was a juror on a separate fraud trial, "interfered with the administration of justice".

There have been two previous similar prosecutions of jurors.

After the attorney general was given permission to bring the cases earlier this year, Davey and Beard were summoned to the High Court where two judges heard the evidence against them before deciding whether they were guilty.

Strong language

Davey, from Palmers Green, north London, said he had sent the Facebook message last December as a result of "spontaneous surprise at the kind of case I was on".

His posting - containing strong language and an offensive word - suggested he was going to find the defendant guilty, said BBC News home affairs correspondent Danny Shaw.

Davey's Facebook post: read: "Woooow I wasn't expecting to be in a jury Deciding a paedophile's fate, I've always wanted to Fuck up a paedophile & now I'm within the law!"

Continue reading the main story

"Start Quote

Every attempt is made to try and warn jurors not to use the internet or social sites for any purpose in relation to the case"

End Quote Sir John Thomas

The judge at Wood Green Crown Court was alerted and Davey was discharged. The defendant, Adam Kephalas, was eventually found guilty of sexual activity with a child.

Davey told the High Court he was unaware he had been in breach of a formal order made by the crown court judge. He accepted he was not meant to discuss the case but believed he was only prohibited from using the internet to carry out research.

In their ruling, High Court judges Sir John Thomas and Mr Justice Sweeney said they rejected as "untruthful" Davey's contention that his message was not meant seriously.

They said it made clear to his Facebook friends "he would use his prejudices in deciding the case" and his choice of words "underlined his disregard of the duties he had undertaken as a juror".

In Beard's case, the High Court heard claims that he had wanted to find out how long the proceedings at Kingston Crown Court would take as he was worried they would drag on.

He was said to have researched the case via the Google search engine and told fellow jurors extra information about the number of victims of the alleged fraud.

The case was abandoned in November last year after more than five weeks when his activity came to light. The two defendants in the fraud case were later found guilty at a retrial.

'Undermining justice'

At the High Court, Sir John - who is shortly to take over as the Lord Chief Justice, the head of the judiciary in England and Wales - said "immediate custodial sentences are almost inevitable in cases of this kind".

Continue reading the main story

"Start Quote

It creates a risk that the defendant will be convicted or acquitted, not on the evidence, but on unchallenged and untested material discovered by the juror"

End Quote Dominic Grieve Attorney general

In his ruling, he said that "every attempt is made to try and warn jurors not to use the internet or social sites for any purpose in relation to the case".

He added: "They have done this so that no juror can subsequently claim that he or she did not understand what they should not do and what the consequences might be."

But Sir John said he would invite courts to consider whether a practice adopted by some judges of also handing out a printed notice should be "universally followed".

Speaking after the case, Attorney General Dominic Grieve said jurors who use the internet to research a case "undermine justice".

Mr Grieve added: "It creates a risk that the defendant will be convicted or acquitted, not on the evidence, but on unchallenged and untested material discovered by the juror.

"Equally, the case of Kasim Davey shows that jurors must follow the directions given to them by the trial judge not to discuss the case outside the jury room, including discussions and posts on the internet."

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Rise in abusive online message cases

30 July 2013 Last updated at 07:14 ET

More than 1,700 cases involving abusive messages sent online or via text message reached English and Welsh courts in 2012, the BBC has learned after a Freedom of Information request.

This is a 10% increase on the figures for 2011, according to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).

Nearly 600 charges were brought between January and May 2013, the figures show.

The revelations come as police say they are investigating abusive tweets sent to MP Stella Creasy.

Under the Communications Act 2003, a person is guilty of an offence if they send "a message or other matter that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character" by means of an electronic communications network.

The CPS figures show that the number of cases fell between 2010 and 2011, from 1,637 to 1,537, then rose to 1,716 in 2012.

But the CPS could not tell the BBC how many individuals these charges related to nor how many resulted in a successful prosecution.

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A CPS spokesperson said: "We cannot disaggregate offences data centrally to indicate the number of people prosecuted or the outcome of the prosecution proceeding - it is often the case that a person is charged with more than one offence."

Reporting abuse

Ms Creasy received the abusive tweets after publicly backing feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez, who was also targeted by Twitter "trolls" following her campaign to have a woman featured on a UK banknote.

Both Ms Criado-Perez and Ms Creasy received rape and death threats via Twitter.

On Monday, Del Harvey, Twitter's senior director of trust and safety, blogged that the micro-messaging platform would extend the "report tweet" function, already available on its iPhone app, to Android phones and desktops.

But she did not give a timescale for the change.

Pressure has been building on Twitter to do more to combat abusive messages sent via the platform.

On Monday, Andy Trotter, chairman of the Association of Chief Police Officers' communications advisory group told BBC Radio 4's The World At One: "They need to take responsibility as do the other platforms to deal with this at source and make sure these things do not carry on.

"They need to make it easier for victims to report these matters and, from a police perspective, they need to know that they can report these things to us."

A Change.org petition calling for Twitter to add a "report abuse" button to its service had attracted more than 71,000 supporters on Tuesday morning.

But while Twitter's rules "explicitly bar direct, specific threats of violence against others", the company says "manually reviewing every Tweet is not possible due to Twitter's global reach and level of activity".

The question for Twitter is how, having made it easier for people to report abusive tweets, it will cope with the potential flood of reports.

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'Hacker heroin frame plot' foiled

30 July 2013 Last updated at 10:23 ET By Matthew Wall Business reporter, BBC News

A respected US-based internet security expert says he has foiled an attempt to frame him as a heroin dealer.

Brian Krebs says the administrator of a Russian cybercrime forum hatched a plan to order heroin, arranged for it to be delivered to his home, then tipped off the police, making it look as if the call had come from a neighbour's house.

Fortunately, Mr Krebs was already monitoring the website and saw the plot being planned in real time.

He alerted the FBI and local police.

"I am little concerned", he told the BBC. "But then there are a lot of things people can do to upset you and get under your skin using a keyboard and few clicks of a mouse.

"But what's the next level?"

The person behind the attempted plot, according to Mr Krebs, set up a bitcoin wallet to accept donations of the digital currency from fellow forum members.

He raised about $200 (£131) worth of bitcoins and used it to buy 12 small bags of heroin using the Silk Road online black market.

The package duly arrived at Mr Krebs's house, and he handed it over to the police.

Hijacked

This is just the latest example of a sustained smear campaign against Mr Krebs orchestrated by hackers and cybercriminals disgruntled at his exposure of their antics.

In March he was visited by a heavily armed police unit tricked into responding to a 911 call that had been made to look as if it originated from his home.

Mr Krebs says he opened the front door to find a squad of policemen pointing a battery of guns at him.

After being hand-cuffed and questioned, he managed to persuade the police they had been hoaxed by hackers.

The informant had used a instant message relay service designed for hearing impaired and deaf people to pretend to be Mr Krebs reporting that Russians had broken into his home and shot his wife.

The phenomenon, known as swatting, after the special weapons and tactics (Swat) teams called out to handle hostage and other dangerous situations, had begun on the West Coast, the police told Mr Krebs, but had been working its way eastwards.

"This type of individual prank puts peoples' lives at risk, wastes huge amounts of taxpayer dollars, and draws otherwise scarce resources away from real emergencies", Mr Krebs blogged.

"What's more, there are a lot of folks who will confront armed force with armed force, all with the intention of self-defence."

Denial of service

Mr Krebs also says his website suffered a major distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

This is when a large number of hijacked computers flood another computer server with messages to render it helpless.

The site was taken offline temporarily as a result.

Mr Krebs will be giving a talk about the rise in DDoS attacks for hire at the Black Hat hackers conference in Las Vegas on 1 August.

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UK aims to tackle mobile black spots

30 July 2013 Last updated at 11:03 ET

The government has published details of its plan to provide mobile coverage to 60,000 homes and businesses currently in black spots before the end of 2015.

It has named which parts of the country will share cash set aside for the project, and the order in which they will receive this investment.

It says efforts to identify sites for new masts are already under way in much of Wales, Lancashire and Aberdeenshire.

The Scottish Highlands are among areas where the work will be completed last.

A total of £150m has been set aside for the Mobile Infrastructure Project (MIP), which was first announced in October 2011.

The money will be used to buy the right to erect masts on various properties and to pay for the infrastructure itself. The equipment will then be used by country's network operators, Vodafone, EE, O2 and Three.

The government says it hopes the first of the new sites will "go live" by the end of this year.

Phased approach

A map showing which areas are being given priority by communications infrastructure company Arqiva - which is running the project - has been published by the Department for Culture Media and Sport (DCMS).

The scheme has been divided into five phases, the first two of which are already under way.

Areas including the Highlands, Dumfries and Galloway, Argyll and Bute, Hampshire, Gloucestershire, Fermanagh and parts of Tyrone are set to be among the last areas dealt with.

But since Arqiva will need planning permission before it can carry out the work, it is possible some places will end up leapfrogging others.

"The project will provide a significant boost to local economies across the UK," said Communications Minister Ed Vaizey.

However, the Countryside Alliance - a lobby group running a "not-spots" campaign - said it was disappointed the government was no longer talking about providing mobile coverage to 99% of the country's population, as suggested by the Treasury in 2011.

"We have previously welcomed the government's investment," said the group's executive chairman Barney White-Spunner.

"We do have concerns, however, that the Mobile Infrastructure Project has been significantly scaled back from its original target, and is now delivering mobile signal to just 60,000 extra premises and 10 sections of A-road where there is no currently signal.

"This falls a long way short of the original target. £150m is certainly a good investment, but we urge government to be more ambitious rather than scale back."

A spokesman from the DCMS responded: "Our refinement work with [communications regulator] Ofcom has indicated that the problem of complete not-spots is not as widespread as first thought.

"There are currently 80,000 premises without coverage, which represents about .3% of total UK premises. The aim of MIP is to cover as many of these as possible, up to the 60,000 announced in the 2012 budget."

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