Madeline Bennett

This month an anti-phishing consortium and an instant messaging focus group were established. The Trusted Electronic Communications Forum, set up by messaging security firm CipherTrust and banks including HSBC, aims to develop best practices to combat phishing attacks - where criminals lure users to fake online banking or other business sites in an attempt to obtain their account details.

Meanwhile, an instant messaging focus group has been launched by Eema, a non-profit e-business association. This group aims to promote interoperable, secure enterprise messaging and to address the issue of unauthorised use of public IM systems within firms.

However, the focus group's objectives sound remarkably similar to those of the Instant Messaging Standards Board. This was a body established in 2002 by a group of US financial services companies, aimed at pushing IM vendors to open up their systems so they could communicate with each other, but in a secure fashion.

And we already had the Anti-Phishing Working Group, whose members are various financial services firms and e-commerce specialists, along with email security vendor Tumbleweed. This group is also hoping its efforts will lead to a crackdown on phishing attacks.

There are also various anti-spam working groups, for example the All Party Internet Group and the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email, along with industry-led schemes such as Microsoft's Caller ID for Email, supported by Amazon, Brightmail and Sendmail.

It's great to see evidence of so much interest in tackling problems such as phishing and spam. But I imagine that in some ways these duplicated endeavours reduce the effectiveness of each separate group - and they would achieve more by combining their efforts.

Meanwhile, from one perspective it looks like the Italian government is taking the strongest stand against spammers. Under the European Commission's Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations, spammers found guilty by an Italian court face fines of up to £60,000 (this compares with £5,000 in the UK), along with a prison sentence. I think the Italian government should be applauded for taking the problem seriously, and should serve as a model for all other governments to follow in the fight against these irritants.

However, that same government should also be pilloried for exploiting spam for its own purposes. The Italian government sent out millions of spam text messages earlier this month, apparently in a bid to boost turnout at the recent local and European elections. The messages, sent from prime minister Silvio Berlusconi's office, contained details about voting procedures. Although the government argued that it was a great example of technology bringing the state closer to its people, opposition parties argued that it violated privacy and was a political tactic to recover votes.

Can we expect to see the Italian PM facing charges under the privacy directive? I expect not, but this example does highlight the importance of working groups and industry initiatives serving the needs of users as opposed to their own.

Joined up, neutral efforts would be the most effective way to deal with these problems. Vendors and user organisations should try to establish and support groups that keep this in mind.

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