Twitter Treasure

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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Twitter is a good invention. It’s easy and fun. Much less demanding and intrusive than Facebook. So much so that many millions of people, from the famous to ordinary people like you and I, use it every day.

On the back of that success the Twitter company is doing very well. But recently it did even better when its shares jumped four per cent in a matter of minutes.

It all happened after a buyout story appeared on the internet that claimed that Twitter had received a significant offer. It started off, “Twitter is working closely with bankers after receiving an offer to be bought out for $31 billion…”

Investors piled in. And not just the amateurs, lots of the ‘professional’ Wall Street guys too.

The trouble was, however, that the internet story was on a bogus web site and was completely fake. The site was called “bloomberg.market”. It was not “Bloomberg.com” the official name of the web presence for the Bloomberg financial organization.

“Bloomberg.market” was what they call a ‘mirror’ of the genuine “Bloomberg.com” website. Whoever designed “bloomberg.market” set it up to look like “Bloomberg.com”. They copied real headlines and linked them back to the real dot-com website. With one exception: the fake Twitter story, which was dressed up to look like a legitimate webpage.

The spike in the Twitter share price only lasted about 15 minutes before Bloomberg denounced the story as fake and the share price dropped back to its previous level. But 15 minutes is a long time in the world of finance and plenty of time for someone to profit substantially from the scam.

No one yet knows who owns the dot-market domain – except the people who own it, of course –  but it was registered just days before the scam message, using a proxy service called “WhoisGuard”, based in Panama, that protects registrant details by offering its own address and contact numbers. But the details of “WhoisGuard” on its own website at “WhoisGuard.com” also appear to be fake, listing a telephone number that is disconnected. Emails to their contact address have not received a response either.

The significance of this incident is not that some greedy and stupid people lost money rushing to buy Twitter shares on the back of this fake announcement.

The problem is that so many new dot word domains have recently been allowed – hundreds of them in fact – that the whole internet is becoming bloated and confusing. And expensive.

If you are a company that wants to protect your online identity and integrity it could now cost you tens of thousands of dollars to cover all the permutations. Not many companies, even huge affairs like Bloomberg, will choose to do that.

That leaves the way wide open for cyber criminals to take advantage of gullible internet users.

I am certain they will.

Like the Twitter announcement, it’s just too good a deal to refuse.

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Safe And Secure

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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Safe and secure is the wish of all of us and we pay other people to make sure that we are. In fact in today’s world hundreds of thousands of people are employed one way or another in the security business.

Looking at the macro-side of it, despite the fact that we all hate being treated as suspects when we go to the airport, most of the time the security people seem to get it right. After all, although many have been planned, there have been very few successful terrorist attacks since the infamous 9-11 in New York City and The Pentagon.

 

Nevertheless we have to be vigilant and cautious no matter where we are in the world. This is particularly so for American citizens and government employees, who are potential targets overseas.

Even in the most unlikely of places.

On July 31, last year, for example, Norwegian Police blocked off the area around Oslo’s royal palace following the discovery of a suspicious object beneath a nearby automobile outside the U.S. embassy.

The embassy was evacuated.

So was Norway’s royal palace and part of downtown Oslo.

Authorities even temporarily suspended subway service.

An international children’s soccer game was canceled at nearby Voldslokka Stadium so that the field could be used to land helicopters close to the embassy.

The Oslo bomb squad, emergency services and other agencies responded to the bomb alert. They examined the ‘device’ but were quickly able to determine that it was in fact a fake, much to the relief of everyone.

However, the incident then raised further questions.

Who had been responsible?

How had the perpetrators managed to breech Embassy security and plant the device, even a fake one?

It wasn’t too long before an “Oh, oh…” was heard.

Keen to make sure everyone was alert to the possibility of an attack, security staff at the U.S. embassy in Oslo had carried out a safety drill earlier in the week. That safety drill had included placing fake bombs on vehicles to rehearse their emergency-response operations.  

However, they forgot about one of the ‘bombs’ and a few days later the practice bomb was spotted on an embassy vehicle as it tried to enter the embassy grounds just after 11 a.m. The eagle-eyed security guards on duty leaped into action and the bomb alert was declared.

Of course the officials concerned apologized for their mistake in leaving the fake bomb, regretting any disruption caused by this incident, and essentially calling a bomb scare on themselves.

Safe and secure? Maybe, but from whom?

Who is going to protect us from the idiots?  

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