Ok, you can both put your hands down now. The concept of an authoritarian regime monitoring everything we do was most famously brought to the public consciousness in George Orwell’s 1949 novel, “Nineteen Eighty-Four”. Since then the term Big Brother has gained notoriety in art and society itself, spawning the tiresome TV show of the same name where a collection of non-entities say and do lots of things that are of absolutely no consequence to anyone whatsoever.
Quickly realising that this introduction is become laboured and tortuous in itself, I’ll get to the point.
One good thing to come out of the Big Brother concept is that white-collar crime is being clobbered over the head by the strong arm of the law. Hot on the heels of the detection of hackers Gary McKinnon, Danielle Duann and Jon Paul Oson comes news that former HSBC worker Jagmeet Channa has been jailed for nine years for trying to steal $141m from the bank. (Link)
Channa stole log-in credentials in order to transfer lots of money to accounts he held in the UK and Morocco. HSBC employees spotted the fraud when Channa stupidly left the account he stole from with a huge overdraft.
The police also used CCTV footage to help convict Channa.
Detective Sergeant Martin Peters said:
“This crime is believed to be one of the largest frauds of its kind and it is thanks to the prompt response of the police and the banks that the money was recovered”
The two former colleagues of Channa whose credentials he stole were questioned and cleared of involvement.
Lax Laptop Owners Lose Loads of Data
We had a bit of “fun” with the Olympics during our last blog and I hope you’ll forgive if I indulge the analogy a little more…but isn’t it about time we set up a competition for major organisations to see who is the industry leader in the skill of losing laptops?
Honestly, what is the story? Put “stolen laptops” into a search engine and don’t be surprised if your PC blows up with data overload. Latest stats show that 637,000 laptops are stolen every year from American airports and Internet company iBahn claim that those who carry valuable information on their laptops do so to the average tune of $525,000!
Ireland’s second-largest bank, Bank of Ireland, admitted recently that laptops containing personal details for 10,000 customers went missing while skirting around the issue of whether or not the data was encrypted (they informed the media that the laptops had “passwords” – about as effective as locking a door using sticky tape).
UK newspaper The Daily Mail revealed last week that they lost a laptop containing names, addresses, bank accounts and sort codes for employees. Again the security red herring of a “system password” was used to put employee’s minds at ease. (Link)
Finance Director MJ Hindley said:
“The likelihood is that this theft was carried out in an opportunistic manner by a thief who will not realise that there is any personal data on the laptop and who may just erase what is on the hard disk in order to disguise the fact that the laptop is stolen.”
Or laptop thieves around the country may now be removing the sticky tape of their latest haul to see just what information they can find…
Forty-Four Thousand Messages, nothing to read
You think the 50 or so emails a day bulging out of your Gmail or Yahoo spam folder is bad? How about 44,000 messages a day?
Six million messages a year – that’s what the UK’s most spammed person, Colin Wells, gets. (Link)
Although he now uses a filtering service to block the spam he says he suffers “withdrawal symptoms”.
“For a couple of months I was clicking a link to stop them resending but I found out this basically confirms the email address as active. From then on the amount of spam I was getting was doubling every couple of months. But it has been a part of my life for nearly a decade and I miss it.”
But every cloud has a silver lining as Colin reveals:
“The emails would make me laugh. They are very clever at getting your attention and the majority would be advertising Viagra – I’m an expert on that topic now”
Well, Colin is 40. It might be a good time to start getting familiar with it.
