What’s This Got to Do with the Price of Corn?
June 16, 2008
The Global Plague
The global nature of phishing scams becomes apparent when you read about how British scammers turned their attention to the fairly remote island of New Zealand in the Southern Ocean nearly 20,000km away.
Users of auction site TradeMe.co.nz had their personal details compromised, their passwords changed and fake listings posted in their name. Five customers lost a total of NZ$40,000. (Link)
The fraudsters offered cars at half their market value, said they could not be viewed and requested Western Union money payments. Spokesperson, Dean Winter, said:
"Do not be convinced to deal with anybody trying to get you to put money into an overseas account. And if the deal sounds too good to be true, it probably is."
It’s not the first time that TradeMe has been the victim of fraud. Internet watchdogs ScamBusters had identified over 1000 compromised accounts that were used to run 3,391 fraudulent auctions for non-existent items.
(Link)
But there were more physical consequences for another TradeMe user when a refusal to remove negative feedback he had posted on the site led the target of that feedback to drive across Auckland to assault him.
(Link)
His actions were described as a "massive brain-fade" and minutes after the attack - where he grabbed the victim by the shirt and pushed him in to the house, forcing him to remove the feedback – he returned to the house to apologise.
The unidentified victim of the attack said:
"It's made me aware that people seem to take the feedback a lot more seriously than it should be."
And you wonder why we don’t allow comments on these blogs?
What’s this got to do with the price of corn?
21-year old hacker Gregory King got a shock on October 1st last year when Federal investigators arrested him at his home as part of Operation Bot Roast (clever that, isn’t it?). I’m sure hackers think they are untouchable so I think it would be great to be there when they are arrested.
Police: Gregory King, you’re under arrest.
Gregory: [indignant] Why!?
Police: You are arrested under suspicion of launching distributed denial of service attacks against the Castlecops anti-phishing Web site and Killanet, an online forum for gamers and graphic designers.
Gregory: Oh. Right, that.
(Link)
Apparently when Operation Bot Roast (brilliant!) turned up, “King exited through the back door, hid a laptop computer in the backyard, and then returned to answer the front door.”
Nothing suspicious about that at all.
King, who obviously has brains to burn, spent two years attacking the sites with a botnet of 7000 hijacked computers. In a karmic ruling, he is set to be jailed for two years.
It’s a pity that King didn’t follow a similar path in life to his 17th century namesake, responsible for Gregory King’s Law: an estimate of by how much a deficiency in the supply of corn will raise the price of corn. And, yes, this is the same law referenced in Charles Davenant’s Essay upon the Probable Methods of making a People Gainers in the Balance of Trade.
Who said company blogs can’t be cultural and educational?
