Thanks to the jaw-dropping incompetence of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) who lost 2 data disks containing financially sensitive information on 25 million people, almost every family in the country will need to be extra vigilant for years to come.
What went wrong?
Some idiot copied the entire database to two disks and sent it in the post where it got ‘lost’. (How some junior office worker could have the security clearance to download an entire database without it setting off an alarms is simply unbelievable.)
How you can protect yourself
- Check your bank statements carefully for any suspicious activity
- If you notice any suspicious activity notify your bank immediately
- If you notice any unauthorised bank account or credit agreements, for example, credit cards, mobile phones, or other financial agreements, notify the company involved immediately and contact the police.
- If you are naive enough to have any passwords related to your children’s names (always a bad idea), change them immediately to a more secure password.
NOTE - Thanks to the level of incompetence, you will need to be vigilant for years.
November 21st, 2007
Okay, the title is a little misleading. A more accurate one would be; ‘In order to be successful running a myspace resource site a certain amount of spamming needs to happen and I wasn’t prepared to do it’ - but it’s not nearly so catchy.
I jumped into what’s known as the ‘Myspace scene’ some time back, having missed the initial goldrush enjoyed by those webmasters savvy or lucky enough to get in early. The rewards could be (and still are) great for those webmasters fortunate enough to have top rankings for the best myspace-related keywords, with some websites earning in excess of $50,000 per month.
My goal was to diversify my web portfolio and I thought the Myspace scene might be a good opportunity for me to do this but I was wrong. For me it was a mistake.
This is because in order to gain a foothold it is necessary to spam.
So how do people spam Myspace?
Fake profiles
Creating accounts and profiles is something of a cottage industry. Believe it or not, I have heard of some people holding and operating 5,000,000 myspace accounts. So the next time you look at how many people are signed up to the social network phenomenon it is worth bearing this in mind. The most successful spam-profiles are those that appear to be that of a celebrity. People then search the site for their favourite celebs and viola! Another ‘friend’ added to the fake celebrity profile for spamming. Even a whiff of media exposure, good or bad, is usually enough to warrant a fake profile.
Friend adders and comment makers
We’ve all had the experience of dealing with people we’ve never heard of adding us as ‘friends’ then comment spamming us into next Sunday. How is it done? Specialised software, that’s how. Software designed specifically to spam Myspace.
Password Phishing
Ever had your myspace account deleted for spamming even although you have never sent a spam message in your life? Chances are someone stole your login details and used them to spam all your friends. Sometimes this is done using fakery to make you think you have landed on myspace when in fact it is a duplicate, designed solely to steal your password in order to spam.
Another way to steal passwords is to ask for it ’so your profile can be automatically updated’. The unsuspecting user wants a nice profile and the myspace resource site offers to do everything for them automatically - all they need do is type in their email and password. Phished. This is why, incidently, Myspace say NEVER use your password anywhere but on Myspace.
Or you may be one of the people who use a common myspace password such as cookie123, iloveyou, fuckyou1, etc. The solution here is to use a strong password.
So that is why I was never comfortable with the Myspace resource site scene - I wasn’t prepared to spam.
November 7th, 2007
