Internet advertising worth �4bn

28 March 2011 Last updated at 19:01 ET By Rory Cellan-Jones Technology correspondent, BBC News

The internet now accounts for a quarter of all advertising spending in the UK, according to figures.

Theyu show that the value of online advertising grew by 12.8% in 2010, breaking through the �4bn barrier.

A study by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and the accountants PwC found that online advertising spending grew three times as rapidly as in 2009.

It also outpaced the rest of the advertising market, which has recovered after dipping during the recession.

Guy Phillipson, the chief executive of the IAB, said: "Major brands restored their advertising budgets in 2010 and online was a big winner."

The biggest growth area was display advertising on social networks, which grew by nearly 200%.

Print media's pain

Facebook has made big advances in the last year in persuading advertisers to see social networks as a place to promote their wares.

With figures showing that UK internet users spend 25% of their online time on social networks, advertisers are keen to tap into this audience.

Online video advertising also nearly doubled in 2010, with �54m spent on adverts that appeared before, during or after video clips.

Mobile advertising raced ahead too, with finance, telecoms and consumer brands trying to reach audiences on the move.

Search advertising, still dominated by Google, remains the biggest earner, although growth in this more mature business was just 8%.

Ian Barber of the Advertising Association says there is one clear attraction which is boosting online spending: "It's targeted, it makes it easier for brands to work out who they're advertising to."

Other areas of advertising recovered last year, with television spending bouncing back after a steep decline.

But much of the Press is still suffering, with magazines and regional newspapers seeing revenues continue to fall. Classified advertising, once a key element in regional newspaper revenues, has now nearly all migrated online.

But Lynne Anderson of the Newspaper Society says local newspapers are capturing some of that online advertising spending on their own websites: "They are getting pretty savvy at capturing audiences in new ways."

She added: "Regional newspapers - print and online - are resilient, innovative and well-placed to benefit when wider market conditions improve."

The IAB expects online spending to continue to grow, as faster broadband makes new formats increasingly attractive.

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Twitter founder rejoins company

28 March 2011 Last updated at 18:52 ET By Maggie Shiels Technology reporter, BBC News, Silicon Valley

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who was pushed out of the company as chief executive in 2008, is to return full time to lead product development.

He will replace fellow co-founder Evan Williams, who has stepped back from daily involvement with Twitter but will remain on the board.

The announcement was tweeted by chief executive Dick Costolo who wrote that he was "excited" by the return.

Mr Dorsey followed up the tweet, saying that he was "thrilled".

He says he intends to remain chief executive of a mobile payments service called Square, which is located near Twitter's San Francisco headquarters.

"As executive chairman, Jack will dive into work with more than 450 people, led by an experienced executive team," Twitter said in a company statement.

"The timing is fortuitous; not only is Twitter experiencing record growth, but we also now have a new infrastructure that will keep us ahead of that growth and enable us to launch products that will make Twitter more instant, simple and always present," the statement said.

The move comes at an important time for the information and communications platform.

Despite the phenomenal take up by around 200 million users, the company faces challenges ahead as it proves itself to be a profitable business.

Last week Twitter celebrated its fifth birthday.

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Hackers target business secrets

28 March 2011 Last updated at 03:01 ET

Intellectual property and business secrets are fast becoming a target for cyber thieves, a study suggests.

Compiled by security firm McAfee, the research found that some hackers are starting to specialise in data stolen from corporate networks.

McAfee said deals were being done for trade secrets, marketing plans, R&D reports and source code.

It urged companies to know who looks after their data as it moves into the cloud or third-party hosting centres.

"Cyber criminals are targeting this information based on what their clients are asking for," said Raj Sumani, chief technology officer in Europe for McAfee.

He said that some business data had always been scooped up when net thieves compromised PCs using viruses and trojans in a search for logins or credit card details.

The difference now was that there exists a ready market for the data they are finding. In some cases, said Mr Sumani, thieves were running campaigns to get at particular companies or certain types of information.

Perimeter defences

Thefts of intellectual property or key documents could be hard to detect, said Mr Sumani.

"You may not even know it's stolen because they just take a copy of it," he said.

Defending against these threats was getting harder, he said, because key workers with access to the most valuable information were out and about using mobile devices far from the defences surrounding a corporate HQ.

"Smartphones and laptops have crossed the perimeter," said Mr Sumani.

The report comes in the wake of a series of incidents which reveal how cyber criminals are branching out from their traditional territory of spam and viruses.

2010 saw the arrival of the Stuxnet virus which targeted industrial plant equipment and 2011 has been marked by targeted attacks on petrochemical firms, the London Stock Exchange, the European Commission and many others.

Mr Sumani said that, as firms start to use cloud-based services to make data easier to get at, they had to work hard to ensure they know who can see that key corporate information.

Otherwise, he warned, in the event of a breach, companies could find themselves losing the trust of customers or attracting the attention of regulators.

"You can transfer the work but you cannot transfer the liability," said Mr Sumani.

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Invention 'boosts phone storage'

27 March 2011 Last updated at 18:57 ET

Scottish researchers have helped to create a device which improves memory storage for technology including MP3s, smartphones and cameras.

The device uses a tiny mechanical arm to translate data into electrical signals.

This allows faster operation and uses less energy compared with conventional memory storage products.

The Edinburgh University researchers worked with the Konkuk University and Seoul National University, in Korea.

The device records data by measuring the current passing through a carbon nanotube, and the binary value of the data is determined by an electrode that controls the flow of current.

Previous attempts to use carbon nanotube transistors for memory storage hit a stumbling block because they had low operational speed and short memory retention times.

By using a mechanical arm to charge the electrode, which operates faster than conventional memory devices, scientists have been able to overcome the problems.

'Novel approach'

Prof Eleanor Campbell, from Edinburgh University's school of chemistry, said: "This is a novel approach to designing memory storage devices.

"With this device you have much faster switching on and off which you do not have with conventional memory storage devices.

"However, one of the issues with these novel devices is how easy they can be manufactured on an industrial scale, which we are yet to see."

Prof Campbell said research was continuing with colleagues in Korea on increasing the operating speed of the device even further.

The findings were published in the journal Nature Communications.

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Spam kings sought after takedown

25 March 2011 Last updated at 08:41 ET

The Rustock botnet, which sent up to 30 billion spam messages per day, might have been run by two or three people.

Early analysis, following raids to knock out the spam network, suggest that it was the work of a small team.

Rustock was made up of about one million hijacked PCs and employed a series of tricks to hide itself from scrutiny for years.

Since the raids on the network's hardware, global spam levels have dropped and remain relatively low.

Net gains

"It does not look like there were more than a couple of people running it to me," said Alex Lanstein, a senior engineer at security firm FireEye, which helped with the investigation into Rustock.

Mr Lanstein based his appraisal on familiarity with Rustock gained while working to shut it down over the past few years.

He said that the character of the code inside the Rustock malware and the way the giant network was run suggested that it was operated by a small team.

That work by FireEye, Microsoft, Pfizer and others culminated on 16 February with simultaneous raids on data centres in seven US cities that seized 96 servers which had acted as the command and control (C&C) system for Rustock.

Mr Lanstein said hard drives from the servers had been handed over to a forensic firm that will scour them for clues as to the identity of the network's controllers.

His hunch that a small team was behind Rustock is partly based on how different it was to other spam networks such as Zeus.

That network, said Mr Lanstein, operates on a franchise basis and involves many different groups and cyber criminals.

By contrast, Rustock was a tightly controlled, if huge, network that brought with it many of the administration headaches suffered by any web-based business.

"They ran into a lot of problems with managing their assets and pushing updates out to a million user network," he said.

Rustock evaded capture for years because of the clever way it was controlled, he said. Victims were snared when they visited websites seeded with booby-trapped adverts and links.

Once PCs were compromised, updates were regularly pushed out to them using custom written encryption. Those downloads contained the spam engine that despatched billions of ads for fake pharmaceuticals.

Updates to PCs in Rustock were also disguised to look like comments in discussion boards, making them hard to spot by security software which typically looks for well-known signs of malware.

The servers controlling Rustock were also located within hosting centres in the US rather than overseas.

"By locating all the C&C servers in middle-America, not in major metropolitan areas, they were able to stay off the radar," said Mr Lanstein.

Hosting costs for the C&C systems ran to about $10,000 (�6,211) per month, he said.

It was hard to estimate how much money the operators of Rustock had made, said Mr Lanstein, but it was likely to be a huge figure.

Since the raids, Rustock's controllers do not seem to have tried to re-assert control of their creation. Legal steps taken by Microsoft could limit any future attempt, said Mr Lanstein, adding that he was not sure they would even try.

"When you are a programmer and you realise that you have the full force of the Microsoft legal department pointed directly at you, then you might say to yourself its time to try something else," he said.

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Microsoft buys old net addresses

25 March 2011 Last updated at 06:59 ET

Microsoft has offered to pay $7.5m (�4.7m) for net addresses from bankrupt telecoms firm Nortel.

The 666,624 IP version 4 (IPv4) net addresses were put up for auction as part of the sell-off of Nortel's assets.

Blocks of IPv4 are valuable because the pool of this generation of address is close to running dry.

It was predicted that a market in IPv4 would appear among companies facing a costly migration to the newer IPv6.

Details of the sale were contained in papers filed to a Delaware bankruptcy court and show that Microsoft's bid was the highest of the 80 firms asked if they wanted to make an offer for the IP addresses.

The deal is yet to be approved by that court and anyone who objects to it can file their comments before 4 April.

If it goes through, Microsoft will get hold of 470,016 of the IP addresses instantly and the remaining 196,608 will be released as former customers of Nortel are moved to other telecoms firms.

IP addresses are used to identify individual computing devices on the internet and private networks.

IPv4 allows for a maximum of approximately 4.3 billion devices.

That number seemed enough in the early 1980s when the standard was first proposed, however the rapid growth in personal computers, smartphones and other internet connected devices means that addresses have been rapidly running out.

The last big blocks of IPv4 addresses were handed out in February and all of them are expected to be used up by late 2011.

Net firms are in the process of moving to version 6 of the IP addressing scheme, which offers more than 3 undecillion individual numbers (3 with 38 noughts)

However, the migration is happening very slowly.

In the interim, it is expected that IPv4 addresses will become increasingly valuable.

It is not clear why Microsoft wants to buy Nortel's supply, however many companies are keen to avoid the cost of changing their networking systems over to IPv6 compatible equipment.

The Microsoft-Nortel deal values the IPv4 address blocks at $11.25 (�7) each, higher than the price many firms charge for a .com domain. This was indicative, said experts, that the market for IPv4 addresses was heating up.

Registries that oversee the allocation of net addresses are also working on plans for a re-circulation system that takes IPv4 addresses from firms that are using IPv6 and releases them for use by others.

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Cyber summit signs training deal

24 March 2011 Last updated at 15:40 ET

A conference on cyber security has ended with a university deal to train a new generation of experts in fighting off criminal and terrorist IT attacks.

The summit in Cardiff agreed that the UK and the US would need to produce many thousands of people with this expertise over the next few years.

Delegates at the University of Wales event included the UN, the US defence department, Microsoft and IBM.

The US says government systems are under continued attack.

The US federal government recently announced plans to spend more than $13bn a year within the next five years on protecting its systems.

In the UK, cyber crime is costing the economy up to �27bn every year, it is estimated.

US officials say cyber criminals, terrorists and other nations are getting better at penetrating state and private networks, whether to spy, to steal data or damage critical infrastructure.

Continue reading the main story

"Start Quote

Cyber-physical security is now considered the number one threat to national security"

End Quote Professor John Williams Geospatial Data Centre, MIT

Last week, the head of the Pentagon's cyber command said the US military lacked the people and resources to defend the country adequately from concerted cyber attacks.

The two-day summit was organised by the University of Wales Global Academy and the Geospatial Data Center of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US.

It also included professors from Harvard University, the University of Oxford, University of Memphis, Boston University and the University of Central Florida.

'Overriding issue'

The University of Wales and the Geospatial Data Centre at MIT signed an agreement to jointly develop cyber security leadership and training programmes.

University of Wales vice-chancellor Professor Marc Clement said he believed the summit was a "major coup" for Wales and the deal signed would put Wales at the forefront of cyber security defence.

He said the university hoped to "work closely with many of the participating academics to take forward the agenda identified by the summit and to advance relations between MIT and the University of Wales".

He added: "We now plan to develop a joint training programme for taking forward educational developments in the field of cyber-physical security, an area that the summit agreed was the overriding issue for government, business, and universities."

Professor John Williams, director of the Geospatial Data Centre, said: "Cyber-physical security is now considered the number one threat to national security, being deemed more critical than conventional nuclear attacks.

"Last year alone, the US logged over 300,000 virus attacks on their networks and noted that organised crime now makes more money from cyber crime than any other activity."

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Iran accused in 'dire' net attack

24 March 2011 Last updated at 07:18 ET

Hackers in Iran have been accused of trying to subvert one of the net's key security systems.

Analysis in the wake of the thwarted attack suggests it originated and was co-ordinated via servers in Iran.

If it had succeeded, the attackers would been able to pass themselves off as web giants Google, Yahoo, Skype, Mozilla and Microsoft.

The impersonation would have let attackers trick web users into thinking they were accessing the real service.

Fake identity

The attack was mounted on the widely used online security system known as the Secure Sockets Layer or SSL.

This acts as a guarantee of identity so users can be confident that the site they are visiting is who it claims to be. The guarantee of identity is in the form of a digital passport known as a certificate.

Analysis of the attack reveals that someone got access to the computer systems of one firm that issue certificates. This allowed them to issue bogus certificated that, if they had been used, would have let them impersonate any one of several big net firms.

It appears that the attackers targeted the SSL certificates of several specific net communication services such as Gmail and Skype as well as other popular sites such as Microsoft Live, Yahoo and the Firefox browser.

SSL certificate issuer Comodo published an analysis of the attack which was carried out via the computer systems of one of its regional affiliates.

It said the attack exhibited "clinical accuracy" and that, along with other facets of the attack led it to one conclusion: "this was likely to be a state-driven attack."

It is thought it was carried out by the Iranian authorities to step up scrutiny of opposition groups in the country that use the web to co-ordinate their activity.

The bogus certificates have now been revoked and Comodo said it was looking into ways of improving security at its affiliates.

Browsers have also been updated so anyone visiting a site whose credentials are guaranteed by the bogus certificates will be warned.

Writing on the blog of digital rights lobby group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Peter Eckersley, said the attack posed a "dire risk to internet security".

"The incident got close to � but was not quite � an internet-wide security meltdown," he said.

"We urgently need to start reinforcing the system that is currently used to authenticate and identify secure websites and e-mail systems," said Mr Eckersley.

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US hacker denies fleeing justice

24 March 2011 Last updated at 05:24 ET

The American hacker who unlocked Sony's PS3 has denied fleeing the country to avoid legal action.

George Hotz, also known as Geohot, said his trip had been planned for months and added that he was still in contact with his lawyers.

Sony had raised questions about the reason for his sudden disappearance in recent legal papers that it filed in California.

The company is suing him for computer fraud and breach of copyright.

To explain his absence, Mr Hotz wrote on his blog: "Factually, it's true I'm in South America, on a vacation I've had planned and paid for since November. I mean, it is Spring break; hacking isn't my life."

He continued: "Rest assured that not a dime of legal defense money would ever go toward something like this."

The blog was written in reaction to reports of his departure which speculated that he may have paid for the trip with money donated by supporters, intended to pay for pay for his legal costs.

Serious question

His absence was brought to light in the latest court documents filed by Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) to the San Francisco court where he is being sued.

They raise concerns, both about Mr Hotz whereabouts and the condition of computer equipment he was due to submit for examination.

The filing states: "SCEA learned that Hotz had deliberately removed integral components of his impounded hard drives prior to delivering them to a third party neutral and that Hotz is now in South America, an excuse for why he will not immediately provide the components of his hard drives as requested by the neutral.

"Hotz's attempts to dodge this Court's authority raise very serious questions."

Sony launched its legal action in California where its US subsidiary is headquartered. It also claims that information relating to the hack was posted on several California-based websites, including Twitter and Youtube.

However, Mr Hotz has disputed the court's jurisdiction, claiming that he is a resident of New Jersey and that the PS3 is made in Japan.

Mr Hotz developed his system for unlocking the PlayStation 3 in 2009. It makes it possible for users to play "homebrew" software and copied games, although he denies that it was his intention to enable piracy.

Sony is taking legal action against Mr Hotz and more than 100 other defendants who, it claims, downloaded the hack.

In previous hearings, George Hotz has been ordered to hand over the IP addresses of users who accessed his website.

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Games industry wins tax relief

23 March 2011 Last updated at 12:05 ET

TIGA, the trade association which represents the UK games industry has described plans to enhance R&D tax credits as a "decisive victory" for its members.

The announcement in the budget should be worth around �7 million to the video games industry, a spokesman said.

It will mean studios can invest more in research and development, as well as hiring additional staff.

But it falls short of the specific tax relief that the industry wanted.

Dr Richard Wilson, TIGA chief executive said: "The R&D tax credits will deliver 60% to 70% more value to games studios than the current tax credit regime."

But he was unhappy that the government had not gone further.

"Failure to deliver TIGA's Games Tax Relief is a dismal decision that displays a complete lack of imagination and one which will leave the UK video games industry swimming against the tide internationally," he said.

"Our key competitors have tax breaks for games production. The UK does not," he said.

Canada, for example, saw its games industry grow by 33% between 2008 and 2010, while the UK sector declined by 9%.

Plans by Labour to introduce tax cuts for the games industry were scrapped by the incoming coalition government during its 2010 emergency budget.

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