Today’s Cyberthreats: Facebook Scams, Wall Street Hacks
Each weekday morning, TechNewsDaily’s colleagues at SecurityNewsDaily give us a roundup on what’s worrying the guardians of cyberspace. Here’s what’s happening today.
FACEBOOK FOLLIES: First, 125,000 people were scammed this weekend by a video promising to show former hip-hop impresario Suge Knight being arrested for the 1996 murder of rap star Tupac Shakur. Then there was a rumor that Mark Zuckerberg was shutting Facebook down on March 15. Finally, a new worm went around the site, promising users naughty photos but in fact infecting their PCs.
JACKPOT! Two men are busted by the Feds after allegedly exploiting a bug in video poker machines. The pair would play until they won small, then press a certain button sequence to bump up the winnings to big money.
EASY MONEY: More number-crunching woes for Wall Street: a researcher’s shown how hackers could make millions in high-speed trading by simply slowing down rival networks imperceptibly, thereby gaining a crucial advantage where milliseconds count.
AMERICAN LESSONS: Two Vietnamese men studying in Minnesota allegedly posed as eBay resellers, auctioning off software and other items. Police say customers got what they wanted, but suppliers were left holding the bag as the pair used stolen credit cards to pay for everything, then had “mules” move money and ill-gotten goods back to Vietnam.
SEX AND THE SINGLE CYBERSPY: The probe into the August death of a British codebreaker who worked for MI6 and the National Security Agency gets weirder. Police say Gareth Williams was into bondage and cross-dressing, and they want to speak to a foreign couple who visited the cybersleuth a few weeks before his naked corpse was found in a padlocked duffel bag.
