Operation n

As I have maintained to people never put out too much information about yourself. In fact putting some false content to pad your profile on there is not unwise. Facebook has been known to keep a lot of information. I mean after all it is very hard to actually remove yourself from it. And all it takes is a bug or leak to reveal such information as birthdays even if you have it set in your profile to being hidden from public. A date of birth associated with a name can all be needed to access someone’s personal details and potentially steal their identity. For example, just the other day, my bank left an automated message to phone back. That’s hightly suspicious in its own right. But after verifying the number on google and the subsequent forum relating to it, it was legitimate. When phoning up, all they required to access my credit card account was the correct date of birth… hmm

Here’s the article, I read in the local rag…

“Facebook has come under fire for a ’shocking’ security breach putting millions of users at risk of ID fraud. The social networking site accidentally exposed member’s dates of birth - including those of people who wanted the information kept secret.
For a committed identity thief, a correct date of birth ‘can be a golden nugger’, warned Sophos IT consultant Graham Cluely. He said: ‘I was shocked to see people’s full date of birth revealed, even though I knew they had their privacy set up correctly to supposedly hide the information. It’s essential that users of social networks have confidence that their privacy will be protected.’
California-based Facebook has now fixed the problem, which came to light during an overhaul of the sire.
But Mr Cluley advised Facebook’s 80 million active members to use a made-up birth date ‘in case this kind of blunder happens again’. Facebook was forced to apologise last March when a glitch allowed user’ private photos to be revealed to everyone - including shots of Paris Hilton she wanted only friends to see.
Meanwhile, another study showed a 278 per cent rise in the number of malicious bugs plaguing the web in the first six months of this year.”

Wait a sec, Paris Hilton knows how to use facebook???

So all-in-all, I’m favour of having a second birth date, just like the Queen

Welcome to the murky waters of recruitment sites. I am sure you have had your fair share of dealing with agents. So much so you’d rather deal with Internet sites? Well be careful of what details you put on those job boards! There has been a trojan that has been harvesting information and passed it on to hackers who naturally sell the information on the black market. Also there is a large-scale phishing attack attempting to get employers and wouldbe employees to divulge personal information.

Two stories here. A Chinese man was jailed after he attempted to divert donations from a Red Cross website to a bank account of his choice. That is really low exploiting a system, which meant to do good for your own ends. In lighter news, it would appear Homer Simpson’s email address that appears in one episode was real, chunkylover53@aol.com. Apparently what happened, it was left unused and hackers reactivated the account!

A recent study has shown that 83.3% of firefox users are running the latest version, whilst only 47.6% of IE users are running the latest patched version. The report suggested that legacy entrprise applications maybe to blame. Some legacy software don’t allow software updates. But I’d throw in that firefox can download and install the latest version for you, which doesn’t appear to be the case for IE.

But look here Microsoft claim IE8 is more trustworthy now! after they have just fixed a code injection problem with vista.

Are today’s browsers inherently bad? Security experts will tell you so. This doesn’t even start considering bugs that may well be found in certain browsers, such as Firefox 3