A District Court in Wisconsin agreed with claims by ISP Earthlink that a bank whose website was incorrectly flagged as "potentially fraudulent" by Earthlink’s toolbar cannot sue the provider because Earthlink was not the publisher of the information in terms of US law..

“Imposing liability on [Earthlink] for the inaccurate
information provided by a third-party content provider would treat
[Earthlink] as the publisher," he wrote, pointing out that
Earthlink is therefore immune from suit under the
relevant section of the Telecommunications Act.

The full ruling here.

[Via News.com]

News.com has a guide (more like a short explanation) to the common cyber scams that are most commonly reported to the Internet Fraud Complaint Center (under FBI.)

[Via CNET News.com, United States -]

More and more financial institutions adopt a two-factor authentication - in this case, Bank West has chosen to use an authentication token (a little device with rapidly changing authentication keys that is in possession of the user) along with a password to authenticate its online customers..

The system is designed to provide customers with greater protection
than that afforded by using static, reuseable passwords. BankWest
Business plans to distribute the free tokens to all customers by the
end of 2005.

This is good news for the financial (and security) industry - two factor authentication is likely to prevent individual account security breaches, and eliminate the threat of phishing - because of the quickly changing authentication code on the security token device, even if a phisher is able to trick a user into submitting his password + token key, the authentication information will be "valid" for the duration of the token key, which usually changes within seconds or few minutes.

[Via ZDNet.com.au, Australia -]