‘Breaking news’ is now a raging scam on Facebook
July 26, 2011 by admin
Filed under Lingerie Events
In the online world, one person’s loss may well be another’s gain. Scams on social networking sites like Facebook buttress this view. News of the tragic Norway events last week, and the untimely death of five-time Grammy award winner Amy Winehouse, who was found dead in London on July 23, are cases in point.
Scams taking advantage of the tragic Norway attacks surfaced within days of the attack. However, Facebook has cleaned out these instances, notes Websense Security Labs. A new social media fraud—‘look at footage of Amy Winehouse just moments after her death’—is going strong on Facebook.
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“This type of a scam is a survey scam, through which users are lured to complete a survey, in return for which they are promised an exclusive video or footage. Completion of the surveys puts some money in the scammer’s pockets, while users completing the surveys are never shown the promised videos or footage,” says Websense.
Security firm Symantec confirms the trend. It has observed spammers trying to capitalise on related news headlines by sending out malicious threats less than a day after the news was released, according to a post on its official blog. Attacks in Portuguese use similar spam techniques. All samples are sent from randomised individual email accounts with various subject lines related to the celebrity’s death in an attempt to lure interested readers to open a malicious URL. Immediately after the link is clicked, a pop-up window asks users to download a file that is loosely disguised as an image or a video file (anything other than an executable file).
The file is given a name that is related to the celebrity, and isn’t an image or video file, but a malicious binary. Symantec has detected the threats in these samples as Infostealer.Bancos. Symantec cautions recipients to be wary of emails that come from an unexpected source, especially emails related to Winehouse’s death.
“Most of these apps would automatically post messages on the victim’s wall and on his friends’ walls in order to trick as many people as possible into clicking (and inadvertently spreading it on). Attention-grabbing messages, combined with platform-specific actions, which have turned into genuine online reflexes (from a mere click, to a tag and, more recently, the creation of an event), make for the perfect scam,” George Petre of BitDefender, a software security solutions provider, writes on an official blog.
The security solutions provider has even launched a free social media security app, Safego, which allows users to prevent tagjacking and eventjacking scams and keep their social network accounts safe. Using in-the-cloud scanning, Bitdefender Safego protects users’ social network accounts from all social scams, spam, malware and private data exposure.
Cybercriminals have exploited the popularity of social networking sites this year, with new scams emerging every month. Likejacking was another such recent social-media based attack that spread on Facebook. It appears along with the ‘Like’ function on the social media site, which account holders could use to create lists of objects they like. “Clicking on an attractive link, the users end up on a page which includes JavaScript; a click anywhere on the page activates the ‘Like’ function, sending a link to the page to everyone in the user’s friend list. This means the number of visits to the site would snowball, and cybercriminals were paid for the increase in traffic by a certain advertising company,” explain Kaspersky experts.
Kaspersky Lab, in its report on information security threats in the second quarter of 2010, claims the company’s products blocked more than 540 million attempts to infect computers around the world. “The countries most targeted were China (17.09 per cent of all attacks), Russia (11.36 per cent), India (9.30 per cent), the US (5.96 per cent) and Vietnam (5.44 per cent),” according to Kaspersky Labs.
Experts believe as social media sites are being accessed over mobile devices—industry reports suggest close to 40 per cent mobile users use social networking apps on their handsets—more scams would emerge. Venkatasubrahmanyam Krishnapur, senior director of engineering (consumer), McAfee, says, “Users should exercise extreme caution when it comes to clicking on links that are sent even by ‘trusted’ friends through e-mails or on social networks. The ‘Like’ feature on Facebook has been used to propagate imitations of Google+ invitations which are actually bad links. This is usually in the form of short URLs that are potentially links to malware sites that the user is unable to spot.”
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Sprint joins University of Notre Dame for groundbreaking, three-year study on …
July 26, 2011 by admin
Filed under Lingerie Events
OVERLAND PARK, Kan., Jul 26, 2011 (BUSINESS WIRE) –
–Sprint to provide 200 devices and service to Notre Dame students involved in the study; relationship is latest example of initiatives between Sprint and the University
The comments and questions have been floating about for years:
“Kids these days don’t talk anymore. They only text.”
“Don’t college kids have any shame? They’ll spill their guts on
Facebook before talking to a real-live person.”
Are these claims true? Or does mobile technology actually help students
learn to better express themselves and ultimately enhance their
face-to-face interactions?
Such questions will be studied and answered during a pioneering,
three-year study by The
Wireless Institute, the University of Notre Dame’s preeminent
research center aimed at developing innovations and educating students
in wireless technology, economics and regulatory policy. Sprint
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+0.58%
will help The Wireless Institute by offering 200 devices and two
years of service for the students who volunteer for the study, funded by
a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
“Mobile technology is central to the lives of American youth,” said
Sprint CEO Dan Hesse. “They’re masters at social networking, gaming and
multi-tasking. There’s an interest in learning if this technology has
changed their face-to-face behavior. We are honored to partner with such
a highly respected university on this landmark study.” Hesse is a
graduate of Notre Dame.
More than 98.8 percent of college students own a cell phone, according
to a 2010 study from Ball State University. The study also found that 97
percent of students use text messaging as their main form of
communication. The Wireless Institute study will delve deeper into
students’ usage habits and also track how that usage affects their
face-to-face communications. The study’s findings will provide a broader
understanding of how technology is embedded in students’ lives as they
transition from teenagers to young adults.
Four Notre Dame professors — Aaron Striegel, Christian Poellabauer,
David Hachen and Omar Lizardo — will lead the study, which will monitor
200 students with specially outfitted smartphones from Sprint. The
devices will have a lightweight agent that tracks how students use the
phones and how they interact digitally with fellow students. The
monitoring will include:
–
Location data, such as proximity to other participants
–
Digital communications, such as social networking, email or texting
–
Digital marketplace, such as app purchases, usage and music
Starting this fall, 200 incoming Notre Dame freshmen will volunteer for
the study, review and sign consent and waiver forms and be tracked for
two years. The third and final year of the study will be spent analyzing
and releasing the comprehensive data on students’ usage and behavior
patterns.
“The study will offer an unprecedented look into how students use mobile
devices,” said Dr. Aaron Striegel, associate professor in Notre Dame’s
College of Computer Science and Engineering. “The data gathered from the
study will offer profound insights about the social impact of always-on
network access as well as improve how we design and manage future
wireless networks. The relationship with Sprint allows us to offer a
cutting-edge smartphone with unlimited text and data services to a
sizeable portion of the incoming freshmen class.”
Adds J. Nicholas Laneman, director of The Wireless Institute: “Our
relationship with Sprint takes an ambitious research project to the next
level and will significantly amplify its impact.”
In addition to the NSF study, Sprint and The Wireless Institute begin a
six-month joint research project this month to study consumer behavior
on the Sprint 3G network. During this study, researchers will visualize
traffic patterns on the network to study customer segmentation and busy
hours at a cell site level. Among other things, they will also explore
which handsets dominate the traffic at particular towers. The data from
this large-scale visualization will then be analyzed for meaningful
trends that can in turn be used to support the customers on Sprint’s
network.
“Delving deep into the inner workings of network behavior will enable us
to further predict usage trends,” said Bob Azzi, Sprint senior vice
president, network. “With increased data demands driven by advanced
devices and applications, it’s vital for us to stay on top of these
trends as part of our continual efforts to improve our customer
experience.”
The Wireless Institute relationship is the latest in several initiatives
between Sprint and Notre Dame:
–
Notre Dame became the first university to officially endorse Sprint
ID, a revolutionary way to customize select smartphones with specific
content such as apps, ringtones, widgets and wallpapers. Notre Dame
students, fans, alumni and the athletic department will soon have
their own customizable Sprint ID packs for free download.(1)
–
In the fall of 2010, Sprint became the official wireless sponsor of
Notre Dame athletics, including this year’s 27-7 men’s basketball
team, which finished second in the Big East and captured a No. 2 seed
in the NCAA tournament.
ABOUT THE WIRELESS INSTITUTE
The Wireless Institute (WI) at the University of Notre Dame is a center
of scholarship and partnerships that addresses challenges of great value
to society in wireless technology, economics and regulatory policy. WI
builds upon longstanding strengths in basic research in communication
technologies which began on the Notre Dame campus in 1899 with one of
the first long distance-wireless transmissions in North America. WI
consists of an interdisciplinary team faculty, students and staff from
the Colleges of Engineering, Business and Arts and Letters that is
actively developing strategic partnerships within key segments of the
wireless industry and with relevant government agencies.
ABOUT SPRINT NEXTEL
Sprint Nextel offers a comprehensive range of wireless and wireline
communications services bringing the freedom of mobility to consumers,
businesses and government users. Sprint Nextel served more than 51
million customers at the end of 1Q 2011 and is widely recognized for
developing, engineering and deploying innovative technologies, including
the first wireless 4G service from a national carrier in the United
States; offering industry-leading mobile data services, leading prepaid
brands including Virgin Mobile USA, Boost Mobile, and Assurance
Wireless; instant national and international push-to-talk capabilities;
and a global Tier 1 Internet backbone. Newsweek ranked Sprint No. 6 in
its 2010 Green Rankings, listing it as one of the nation’s greenest
companies, the highest of any telecommunications company. You can learn
more and visit Sprint at
www.sprint.com
or
www.facebook.com/sprint
and
www.twitter.com/sprint .
(1) Sprint ID: Up to 5 packs available at once on select
devices. Packs may vary by device. Pack selection may change without
notice.
SOURCE: Sprint
Sprint
Candace Johnson, 317-660-2232
Candace.Johnson@sprint.com
or
University of Notre Dame
William Gilroy, 574-631-4127
gilroy.6@nd.edu
Copyright Business Wire 2011
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