Today’s Cyberthreats: Twitter Target, Keyless Car Theft
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.
TWITTER TARGET: Twitter’s fighting a U.S. government subpoena to hand over information about WikiLeaks-related accounts. If it caves, as it probably will have to, Twitter will likely be the next subject of an Anonymous “hacktivism” attack, akin to those against Amazon, PayPal and MasterCard in November.
HOAX, NOT COKES: The latest phishing scam pretends to be part of Coca-Cola’s “My Coke Rewards” sweepstakes program. It invites e-mail recipients to take part in a survey – except that this survey asks you for your credit card numbers, driver’s license and mother’s maiden name.
PAYPAL PHISHING: A similar scam is afoot, with e-mails telling recipients their PayPal accounts have been “limited” – and, of course, the only solution offered is to enter all sorts of personal data into an unauthorized Web page.
KIM JONG PWN: On the lighter side, hackers took over North Korea’s Twitter and YouTube pages over the weekend. A video posted on Saturday, the birthday of Kim Jong-un (the designated successor to current strongman Kim Jong-il), showed a cartoon of the heir apparent driving a snazzy sports car into a crowd of his starving subjects.
DRIVE MY CAR: Strike a blow against convenience. Researchers found it easy to tamper with the key fobs that unlock and start late-model cars wirelessly. All they had to do was “bridge” the gap between the key fob and the car. Bad Guy No. 1 could follow you into a store, stand several feet away, press a button and transmit your key fob’s signal to Bad Guy No. 2, who’d be standing next to your car in the parking lot. Click, va-vroom, and your ride’s gone.
