Posts tagged Malicious
Twitter Buys Startup Dasient to Fight Malicious Advertising
Jan 28th
Twitter has acquired security startup Dasient, which describes itself as an anti-malware vendor for large enterprises in the financial services, media, and online sectors. Its technology will be housed within Twitter’s revenue engineering team.
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PostSecret Shuts Down Paid iPhone App Due To Malicious Content
Jan 2nd
Along with Sunday morning’s secrets, PostSecret founder Frank Warren announced that the $2 PostSecret iPhone app is now closed. Warren received complaints from users, Apple and the FBI about bad content on the anonymous art app. He says that users, moderators and his own family were threatened, citing two specific incidents he can’t discuss further. Launching the app now displays only one secret announcing the closing.
Whereas submissions to the PostSecret blog are curated by hand, the app was an experiment allowing any iPhone user to generate secrets instantly and anonymously. Warren says that users shared over 2 million secrets, and that “99%” of them “were in the spirit of PostSecret.” The app launched in September, becoming the best-selling app in the U.S. and Canada overnight. It is now gone from the iTunes store, the Android version never arrived, and the PostSecret App website no longer loads.
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The PostSecret app was a brave thing to try. Even though it was clunky and slow, we praised it for the privacy and anonymity it provided, allowing users to submit secrets without fear. Unfortunately, this anonymity proved too much for volunteer moderators to handle.
“The scale of secrets was so large,” Warren says, “that even 1% of bad content was overwhelming for our dedicated team of volunteer moderators who worked 24 hours a day 7 days a week removing content that was not just pornographic but also gruesome and at times threatening.” In my experience, that 1% figure sounds a bit conservative. The chances of seeing something gross were pretty good on any given night.
Warren says that he had to remove the app from his own daughter’s phone weeks ago. Bullies and creeps overloaded the app, and Warren and the moderators were unable to find a solution. At one point, the moderator team tried pre-screening 30,000 secrets a day, but they couldn’t stem the tide of unsavory secrets.
Warren calls the now-defunct PostSecret app a “good faith experiment,” but it’s also an unfortunate lesson in the necessity of curation. It raised the privacy bar for app developers, but it opened up a Pandora’s Box of backwardness in doing so. The app was rife with penis pics, vicious attacks and other disturbing messages. It was a valiant attempt to allow millions more to share their secrets, but for now, the PostSecret project will go back to its roots as a hand-curated blog.
Those who paid for the app can take comfort in the fact that their $1.99 supported an organization with good intentions.
Did you use the PostSecret app? What did you think of the experiment? How do you feel about the app shutting down? Share your thoughts in the comments.
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Malicious Hackers Play Robin Hood, Anonymous Disavows Action
Dec 26th
A rogue group of malicious hackers penetrated the database of U.S. think tank Stratfor over the Christmas holiday weekend and stole thousands of credit card files. Those credit cards were then subsequently used to make online payments to a variety of charitable organizations. Modern day digital Robin Hood? Think again.
The hack was perpetrated by a groups of malicious hackers loosely affiliated with anti-security group Anonymous. It is hard to tell what hackers are actually part of Anonymous these days as with each successive scheme, one group will claim it is working under the Anonymous banner while another will disavow the action. At this point, Stratfor does not really care what the hackers call themselves.
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Stratfor, short for Strategic Forecasting, is a company that caters to the U.S. intelligence community. Hence, it is loosely tied to the U.S. government, making it a target of Anonymous-like hackers. The company tracks global open data to come up with a daily briefing that it sells to its clients. The client list was confidential until the hackers published it on Dec. 24, 2011.
The hackers claim that the credit card data in Stratfor’s database was unencrypted. It is then ripe for the picking. Even though most Anonymous hacks are not designed for outright theft, this wing of the group used the credit card information and started making payments to charities such as the American Red Cross, CARE, Save The Children and Africa Child Foundation. Approximately 17,000 cards were compromised in the hack (though not all had payments to charitable organizations).
While this might seem noble and altruistic, especially the day before Christmas, security blog F-Secure.com points out that the charities involved will have to refund the money when people realize that there are unauthorized transactions on their cards. The charities will need to return the money and may face fees and penalties. There will also be the inevitable cost of human capital to sort the whole mess out.
The Stratfor hack was apparently done by a group of Anonymous associated with a hacker named Sabu. After Sabu and others posted the Stratfor information online, the main Anonymous group moved quickly to say that they had no part in the breach of the company. In a “press release” on Pastebin, an Anonymous member said that the hack was not done by group and that, “Hackers claiming to be Anonymous have distorted this truth in order to further their hidden agenda, and some Anons have taken the bait.”
The Anonymous member goes on to say:
“Stratfor has been purposefully misrepresented by these so-called Anons and portrayed in false light as a company which engages in activity similar to HBGary. Sabu and his crew are nothing more than opportunistic attention whores who are possibly agent provocateurs. As a media source, Stratfor’s work is protected by the freedom of press, a principle which Anonymous values greatly.”
The mention of HBGary is in reference to a series of hacks that the main Anonymous group did claim responsibility for in July 2011. HBGary and consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton were targeted in a raid that released 90,000 emails related to the U.S. Department of Defense and actions taken by those two firms that Anonymous believed to be violating the rights of online citizens. The data collection and dissemination by Stratfor apparently does not fall under the same category of the supposed grievances against Booz Allen Hamilton and HBGary.
The Stratfor website is currently offline as of Monday, Dec. 26 at 12:35 p.m. EST.
What do you think of this supposed Robin Hood move by Sabu and his cohorts? Is this the type of activities that so-called “hacktivists” should be engaging in? Let us know in the comments.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Google Pulls Fake Angry Birds, More Malicious Apps From Android Market
Dec 13th
Google was forced to pull a series of malicious Android apps masquerading as legitimate titles such as “Angry Birds”, after they were discovered on the official Android Market apps store on Monday.
Irate Android customers and developers took to …
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Malicious Websites Jump Dramatically in 2010 – eWeek
Nov 11th
 ChannelBuzz.ca |
Malicious Websites Jump Dramatically in 2010
eWeek A new report from Websense highlights both the growth of malicious sites as well as widespread SEO abuse by attackers. … Searching For News Is Riskier Than Searching For Porn, Study Says Is surfing for news more dangerous than surfing for porn? |
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