This is been quite a week with several celebrities that have passed away including Ed Mcmahon, Farrah Fawcett, and of course Michael Jackson. As a result there are of course a flury of scams that are attempting to get people to click on links, open attachments and an assortment of other things. In addition to this, we are seeing people taking advantage of the media, and how quickly bad information can be spread in our “instant information” society. Stars that in fact are alive and well had passed away supposidly according to Internet blogs, web posts, Twitter, Facebook, and even some television stations. A hacker even broke into Britney Spears Twitter account and and posted this message to all those that follow her “Britney has passed today. It is a sad day for everyone. More news to come”.
Manipulating media…in other words Media Hacking or “Macking” (as we have decided to call it) is becoming quite popular. There are of course many ways this can be facilitated. I love the example on September 8, 2008 when old news report from December of 2002 was rehashed by someone about the bankrupcy of American Airlines and posted to Google who then applied a current date to the article (because it didn’t have one of its own). The article was picked up by a 3rd party analyst and posted to the Bloomberg news network and within minutes the stock had plumeted more than 80% and the SEC had to halt trading on it.
Macking can be very profitable for cyber criminals, and in this day in age when search engines can be manipulated, botnets can send billions of email messages, social networking sites have works and viruses that can spread messages, it is easy to see why they do this.
In my opinion, Macking is the lowest of the low hanging fruit. It is practically the fruit that falls off the tree and rolls to your feet.
