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Written on 22nd January 2009
11 COMMENTS 
Toivo Tänavsuu, Next Web Estonian Web Tipr & founder of TigerPrises.com
The Estonian tech-visionaries, led by Ahti Heinla – one of the Founders of Skype, and Rainer Nõlvak are developing what they call “predictive content personalization technology”.
They plan to debut this technology in a project called DailyPerfect. That is a news site that predicts your interests through an automated semantic analysis of information publicly available on you on the web.
DailyPerfect’s site is meant for everyone reading news online and wishing to find interesting stuff easily. They don’t tell too much about this, since the project is at the moment in closed beta-stage. But will be launched publicly at the beginning of next year.
DailyPerfect was initiated by Ambient Sound Investments and Curonia Research. The team is led by Asko Seeba – the former Engineering Manager at Skype, and Ahti Heinla – a partner at Ambient Sound Investments and the former Lead Architect at Skype.
Read more about DailyPerfect here.
Written on 12th January 2009
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Toivo Tänavsuu, Next Web Estonian Web Tipr & founder of TigerPrises.com
NATO wants to be well prepared when facing cyber-terrorists, so the alliance has established a think tank called the Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence in Estonia. Let’s just call it NATO Cyberbrain.
No computer freaks, but just ties
I paid a visit to Alliance’s Cyberbrain and was somewhat surprised – instead of a bunch of computer freaks sitting behind screens and being clinged into cyberspace I only saw men wearing suits and ties. They explained to me it’s a think tank, receiving the “raw data” from national CERTs (computer emergency response teams).
Own rules for cyber attacks
Another funny thing is that they follow the rules created by themselves. They are neither accountable to NATO nor US or Estonia’sn Defence Ministry’s. Only to their own steering committee.
So, for example, if this committee would decide to establish close cooperation with Kaspersky, which people say has connections with Russian administration, they’d do it. Although the Kremlin is believed to have fuelled or at least approved well-known cyberattacks against Estonia and Georgia.
Read more about 2007 cyber attacks against Estonia from here and beware – it could happen in your country too. (more…)
Written on 13th October 2008
18 COMMENTS
Toivo Tänavsuu, Next Web Estonian Web Tipr & founder of TigerPrises.com
What do we know about Nigeria? That it’s one of the poorest nations in the world. Nigerian GDP per capita is only about 4% of what US has. But one certainly can’t say that Nigerians aren’t smart. Defrauding, for example an iPhone or a laptop from some naive and not-too-smart European is piece of cake for some of them.
Forget about chain letters, and spam, where someone unknown desperately begs you to send just a bit of money to his account, so that he could “buy out” a huge unexpected heritage from passed away relative. And split it 50:50 with you afterwards, of course. That’s an old way of cheating people online. And it’s history.
In 2008 swindlers use considerably more sophisticated, yet very simple scams. And surprise-surprise, they gave a fling on me!
I had an iPhone. Bought it in the US, brought it to Estonia, unlocked it and used it for a while. But about four months was enough for me to realize: this “superstar” gadget is not worth all this buzz around it. If you want to know why I think that, please stay tuned, there will be a follow-up on that from me.
But today I want to discuss the fraud attempt of some Nigerians. Here’s how they wanted to fool me:
Juliet Malcos from Liverpool wants my iPhone
I had just put my iPhone for sale in local Estonian commercial announcements website Soov.ee, when I received a surprising purchase request via Gmail. Apparently from a lady named Juliet Malcos, according to her Yahoo e-mail address. She was claiming to live in Liverpool, UK (that’s 3000 kilometers from where I live) and she was interested in “immediate purchase” of my item. Her desperate cry for my abandoned iPhone was so loud, that she offered me 600 euros for the piece (175 euro more than I wanted at first place), plus recoup of the shipment costs.
We exchanged several e-mails. But here’s the funniest part: She said the phone was needed for her daughter’s school project. Her daughter was about to leave from Heathrow airport to Nigeria for this project.
So I had to hurry up. ”The British lady” asked for my account number, but more importantly, she asked me to send the phone via DHL or FedEx over to address “Temitope Johnson, 1 Balogun Street, Mokola, Ibadan city, Oyo State, 23402 Nigeria”, while she would “rush” into her bank for money transaction.
Confirmations from Citibank
The next day an email pops into my Gmail-box, letter with some copy-paste logos from CitiBank:
Sender: CitiBank Service citibanktransfer@citigroupservice.com
Subject: ***FURTHER UPDATES FOR SHIPMENT REQUIRED***DO NOT REPLY***
Message: Transfer money between your Citi and non-Citi accounts.
ONLINE TRANSFER OF FUNDS.
Dear Valued Customer:Toivo Tanavsuu,
We have received the order for the transfer of the full payment of EUR 600.00€ from our client,the buyer of your item Mrs Juliet Malcos.
We have authorized the immediate transfer of the full payment to your bank details provided below.
We have concluded the procedure for the transfer of the full payment to your account with authorization code: 401-280190-1-59-0
Estimated Date Of Transfer : Thursday,09th of October ,2008
19:23:12 %2B4000 (EDT)
Based on our security measures for the protection of our customers,the payment transfer has been encrypted with a password prior to the receiver of the proof of shipment by our client.
We will send you the password for the release of the money to your accounts after you have sent the scanned receipt of shipment to Mrs Juliet Malcos. Alternatively you can send it to our account section with the contacts provided below.
This is the new directive from our Risk Management Team.
You can go ahead now to ship out the item to Mrs Juliet Malcos.
The CITIBANK MANAGEMENT will send you the password to activate your bank account within the next 72 hours of your sending the evidence of shipment to your buyer.
THIS IS AN AUTOMATED MESSAGE DO NOT REPLY TO THIS EMAIL ADDRESS
Tell:+447024079092
Tell:+447024096947
Tell:+447024096951
Tell:+447737063918
Fax:+448704783490
e-mail : Citi-Bank Correspondent:citibanktransfer@citigroupservice.com
Tell?
So what she wanted me to do was to send my iPhone over to Nigeria. Only after I have made the shipment and sent the shipment verification number to the so-called Citibank, they would be able to complete the transfer of my 600 euros. But we all know that the abbreviation for word “telephone” is not “tell”, but “tel”..
Anyway, only few hours later I received another e-mail from “CitiBank Service” saying the payment of Mrs. Malcos had been processed successfully and that it could take 24 to 72 hours till my bank would confirm this. That is, whenever the shipment was verified.
Some people actually fall for it
Well, eventually I had to disappoint my “Nigerian pal” Juliet. Didn’t send the phone to Africa. I guess there’s no need to say that I saw no 600 euros in my account either. She underestimated me big time!
People, please warn your naive friends about this! Some offers are too good to be true. And I am not the only one targeted with breath-taking offers “from UK”.
Estonian daily Eesti Päevaleht published a story about an Estonian, how he was selling his smartphone, just as I did sell mine. Apparently “Mary Jones“ from UK contacted him and wanted to purchase the piece for her friend who lives in Nigeria.
DHL wants you to think twice
The exact same story: just send the piece over to Nigeria please, via DHL and you will have 500 wasy euros in your account! Confirmation e-mails from “CitiBank Service” and everything. The guy was also lucky, because he saw this through as well. But played along for a while.
But unfortunately some of us, Estonians, haven’t been that fortunate. I was speaking with DHL Estonian representatives and they told me that one other guy fell for the scam. He sent his laptop over to Nigeria, believing all these nice promises coming from UK. The fraudulent pilgrimage of his laptop was stopped by DHL in Nigeria, but poor guy had to pay several hundred dollars for the shipment forth and back, before the item was returned to him.
So from now on, every time somebody wants to send something from Estonia over to Nigeria, DHL asks to double-think. They say from their wide experience that Nigerian con men are also pretty active in environments like eBay.
Where things stand between me and Juliet iss hard to tell, because the situations is bizarre. She is still writing me e-mails asking for the shipment receipt.
Written on 10th October 2008
2 COMMENTS
Toivo Tänavsuu, Next Web Estonian Web Tipr & founder of TigerPrises.com
There’s an almost unobserved but large scale Internet business being run from Estonia. It’s called Fotki. Happy tenth birthday to them!
Many people, especially from US, Canada and UK, but also Estonia, Lithuania and Iceland are familiar with the site Fotki.com. The founder Dmitri Don calls it photo-sharing, photo-printing, photo-selling and blogging website. I’d call it image-oriented social network. One that’s pretty good-looking.
Last year the site was recognized by CNET as one of the best Web 2.0 applications in the world, side by side with success stories like YouTube and MySpace.
Dmitri Don, who claims he never had to go to school to learn programming, says Fotki.com has more than half a million unique visitors and about 25+ million unique people who they serve images from their cluster. These are daily figures.
“We power the world”
But Fotki, as Don point out, is not just a website, but also web service. “We power the world, but nobody knows much about this!” Don says. The Estonian company is licensing photo-sharing software and providing hosting and storage services for digital content for huge global companies, with annual turnover over $50 billion.
One of them is Telecom Italia, the giant operator that’s active in seven European and Latin-American markets. Alice.it, its multifunctional web portal is powered by Fotki photo engine.
US clients
Another big guy Fotki serves is US retailer Sears, that operates more than 3800 shops. Sears’s home management and services portal ManageMyHome.com is run by Fotki’s photo engine. Don hurls names of US clients, one after the other - vacation organizer Mark Travel, media group Vegas.com, turism company Funjet.com etc.
Exceptional team in Estonia
Fotki was founded ten years ago in New York by Don and his wife Katrin Lilleoks (both pictured). By accident that was the exact same day some other guys founded Google! Fotki’s back-office and development team is in Estonia, Tallinn. This team is kind of exceptional, because it consists of 25 Russian-speaking Estonians, lead by Russian citizen Pavel Merdin.
“East Coast not a good place for Internet business”
This year Fotki moved its US office from New York to Silicon Valley. “The East Coast is not a good place for Internet business. People there don’t know much about the Internet. They ask stupid questions, like why do people want to upload their photos online?” Don claims.
An East Coast bank refused to open an account for Fotki in 2001. That’s because Don had said to the banker that he is running an Internet business. Don: “People from East Coast think that Internet business is porn, gambling, stealing and dirty money!”.
Fotki will raise some venture capital from Europe very soon. “Stay tuned!” says Don.
Written on 30th September 2008
2 COMMENTS
Toivo Tänavsuu, Next Web Estonian Web Tipr & founder of TigerPrises.com
A remarkable “Oh Shit” campaign has launched in Estonia, aimed at educating ordinary computer users.
Many of you probably remember Estonia survived what has been called the world’s first Cyber War last year. It was launched by Russians and made headlines around the world. Thanks to The Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) Estonia, led by the chief security officer Hillar Aarelaid, Estonia was successful in defending itself against the so called DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks.
A couple of weeks ago, Aarelaid’s team launched a somewhat controversial campaign in Estonia, aimed at educating the computer users in Estonia. The campaign is called “AssaPauk”, which can be translated in English as “What a hell?” or “Oh Shit”! There’s a good chance this is your first emotion after discovering that you are in some sort of a criminal “cyber mess.”
The campaign, that should guide people how to use the Internet safely, is focused on three lessons: which links are OK to click and which are not? What kind of passwords to use? And how to avoid an unpleasant identity theft.
“I am a pedophile! How about you?”
Actors telling real stories are used to get the lessons across. For example, there’s a guy who says that he was made a pedophile inadvertently. He used short easy-to-memorize password (his wife’s name) for many different Internet applications. When suddenly finding that someone had guessed the password and uploaded nasty porn images into his weblog. (Take a look at his YouTube video, the poster below is saying “I am a pedophile! How about you?”)
“I am a thief! How about you?”
Or there’s a woman claiming that she had made a thief against her will. She clicked on an unknown link and apparently a virus downloaded into her computer. So her computer was used to steal credit card data of other people. And now she has become a suspect of serious crime. (YouTube video, the poster above is saying “I am a thief! How about you?”)
Member of an international gang
Another woman received an e-mail saying that she should update her Internet banking passwords immediately or they will expire. For doing that she was asked to fill in her existing passwords and sent them to “the bank”. She ended up sending her passwords to strangers, who used her bank account for transferring stolen money. So without knowing it, she became member of a international thief gang. (YouTube video)
CERT gives many different hints to avoid such unpleasantness. Hillar Aarelaid says that the days where viruses only harmed files are over. Today criminals are infecting people’s computers to take control over them and use them for criminal purposes, while remaining undetected.
If you understand Estonian, take a look at how Estonia educates its people, by clicking here.
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