Facebook Invitation and the Olympic Torch
Old hoaxes never die. They just get transplanted to Facebook.
chain letter
Facebook Sympathy Hoax: No Surprises
No, Craig Shergold doesn't need a heart transplant. Others do, but Facebook sharing isn't the best way to accomplish that.
Osama bin Laden is alive and well… on Facebook
The death of Osama bin Laden has gone viral, with blogs, social media and search engines pumping terabytes of rumor, innuendo and conspiracy theories at the speed of light, along with the occasional kilobyte of truth. As the number of people searching for pictures and videos of bin Laden’s execution has skyrocketed, the criminal syndicates
Global malware thrives on the demise of a global terrorist
[NOTE: As we were publishing this articl, our Latin American office discovered another Black Hat SEO campaign incorporating promises of Osama bin Laden videos on Facebook. Click here to view their article in Spanish. We will follow up on this shortly. AG] The malware phenomenon started by the announcement of Osama Bin Laden’s death continues
Cyberthieves just love a good wedding, or a funeral…
Not using Twitter or Facebook is, in these times, akin to not owning or using a mobile ‘phone. Last night’s events – the reported death of Osama Bin Laden – proved that we are well and truly in the Twitter era (Twitter reported that over 4000 tweets per second were made immediately preceding the President’s
BingDings* Force Change of Tune
* Sorry, but I couldn't resist a Crosby reference. I was more than a little irritated over the weekend – see Faith, Hope, Charity and Manipulation – by Microsoft's use of the Japanese disaster to give the Bing search engine a little extra exposure using a chaintweet technique: How you can #SupportJapan – http://binged.it/fEh7iT. For every retweet,
Armor-Piercing Rounds for Chain Mail
In my copious free time, I contribute to and in some cases maintain a number of other blogs (the ones with a security bias are listed in my signature here). The chainmail/hoax checking page at http://chainmailcheck.wordpress.com/ was specifically set up to explore a hoax/chainletter mitigation project that's still in the preparatory stages, but I've been posting
Corpus Christi Hoax Mail
Bill B. forwarded an interesting hoax mail to my "hoaxchecker" account (hoaxchecker [at] gmail [dot] com. The hoax isn't so interesting in itself, in that it's been around quite a while, as is described at the ever-dependable hoax resource snopes.com. But I do find interesting the fact that this particular variant includes some wrinkles that
The Return of Jacques Tits
It has been a year since we last discussed fraudulent domain name registrar scams and we wanted to let people know that this scam continues unabated. In a nutshell, a message is sent to a publicly-visible email address listed on your website (sales, support, the CEO's office, a public relations contact, et cetera) from a
Great Hoax From Little Acorns…
I learned a new word today. “Glurge”, according to snopes.com, an essential resource when checking the validity of dubious chain letters, glurge is the sending of inspirational (and supposedly true) tales … that often … undermine their messages by fabricating and distorting historical fact in the guise of offering a “true story”. I came across
That BT Scam Again
A few days ago, I mentioned an email chain letter that’s going round in the UK about a scam where where “the bad guy poses as a telephone company operative and threatens to cut off service unless the panicked recipient of the call immediately pays an allegedly unpaid bill. Faced with a sceptical potential victim,
When is a Hoax not a Hoax?
Embarrassingly, I keep catching myself promising to come back to a topic and never getting round to it, however often I try to blog here. (The server is gradually filling up with my half-completed drafts!) There are just too many interesting things happening and not enough time to record them all here – this isn’t, after
Hoax: “Life is beautiful”
When I get a chain letter like this, I don't usually respond to everyone else who received it, even when it's a hoax (as it usually is)...