Technology Talk

Last year, Dov Tenenboim of North Bondi hacked into at least 90 different eBay sellers’ accounts and sold $13,482 worth of non-existent Apple iPods. Last week, he pled guilty. Tenenboim went after eBay users with easy-to-guess passwords - such as those that use their seller name as their password.

When referring to the case, an eBay spokesperson stated the obvious

“What the case highlights is the importance that people need to place in choosing a sensible password,”

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Imagine this scenario. You’ve just been made legally blind by a group of doctors performing lasik eye surgery. You put up a website that mentions the doctors’ names. The doctors get mad and have their lawyer send you a nasty cease-and-desist. You take the site down while you contemplate your options. Then, a few weeks later, you put the website back up with new content and docs.

Do you still have the right to name the doctors on the site? Read the rest

Apparently, it’s not that difficult to make $2-3 million through identity theft. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve undoubtedly received at least one email claiming to be from some wealthy Nigerian (or other foreign country) and offering you a sum of several millions of dollars if you’d only help them get the money out of the country. To do that, you must send them your bank information.

Not surprisingly, there are a lot of “opportunists” out there who give up their info in exchange for this possibility of wealth. These gullible saps soon become the victims of identity theft. Read the rest

Phishing scammers are adding voice over IP (VoIP) technology to their mix and ensnaring victims over the phone. In phishing schemes, scammers send an email impersonating from Paypal or a high profile bank. They usually mention that your account is about to expire or they detected fraudulant activity and ask you to log into a site to correct the info. The site you are referred to looks just like Paypal’s or the bank’s website, but it’s not affiliated with the company. When you log in, you effectively hand over your username, password, and any other sensitive data you input directly to the scammer. Read the rest

Last week, AOL released 20 million web queries from 650,000 AOL users. A few hours later, they realized this was probably one of the dumbest things they could have done, quickly removed the data, and apologized. A mirror site containing the 439 MB compressed download is still available (it expands to 2GBs) and is some fascinating stuff for anyone interested in search behavior, data mining, or online marketing in general.

For those of you who don’t want to download the info, there’s a number of web interfaces up at AOLSearchDatabase.com, AOLSearchLogs.com, and AOLStalker.com to allow anyone to search the database - or you can get some of the highlights from CNN.com. Read the rest