Israeli Software

David Benyon from Op Risk and Compliance magazine reports

A new bribery and corruption legislation will be put before the UK parliament. Doing business using bribery would mean jail for a decade under the bill.

“The new Bribery Bill will make it far easier for companies and senior management to be prosecuted where bribes have been offered, paid or received. The new legislation will be even wider than the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, because it covers business-to-business transactions as well as business transactions with government or state-owned bodies,” says Neill Blundell, partner and head of the fraud group at law firm Eversheds”

A common vulnerability in online ecommerce sites is fraudulent manipulation of user profiles in order to boost the ratings of products in online recommender systems and overall reputation of the web site.

This article – Unsupervised Retrieval of Attack Profiles in Collaborative Recommender Systems casts this problem as a problem of detecting anomalous structure in network analysis and proposes a novel mechanism for detecting this anomalous structure.

Back in the late 70s when I was a grad student in physics I gave a paper in Pisa and then in Bari.  The differences between Pisa and Bari were very clear – Pisa – Northern Italy, very European and industrialized, Bari, South of Italy, very agricultural and very Mediterranean – the one thing that stuck in my memory though was how distrustful the people in Bari were of strangers. I asked our host at the University of Bari and he said “well of course, this is Mafia country, they ARE suspicious of strangers, you never know…”

Italian police say they’ve made 96 arrests after busting a European counterfeiting and money laundering ring. Most of the arrests were made in southern Italy’s Calabria and Campania regions.

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