PCR Tech and IT retail, distribution and vendor news
This week’s roundup takes a look at the aftermath of the Heartbleed bug, a new ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ stock scam, and how data attacks affect UK businesses.
Following the news about the Heartbleed bug, the co-founder and president of OpenSSL has said that the issues highlight the lack of responsibility towards the software shown by governments and major companies.
Steve Marquess has criticised the tech community for not providing funding to the project despite using the software.
The NSA has now issued its own suggestions for avoiding lost Heartbleed data.
Websites and web services using the affected software are being told to update, or turn off the function with enables the security flaw. The NSA also suggests that users get in touch with the client/server software creators directly and make sure that once they are on a safe version of the website/service/OS to change all passwords.
Meanwhile, AppRiver has discovered a spam campaign that buy shares in a penny stock and send massive amounts of spam to users around the globe to generate interest in the stock.
Known as a ‘Pump and Dump’ campaign, once real investors are duped into buying stock, the scammers offload their shares, walking away with a ‘legitimate’ profit.
Sound familiar? That’s because the scam is almost identical to the plot to ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’.
Troy Gill, security analyst at AppRiver, commented: “The only real difference is that the scammers used cold calling instead of spam emails in the film.”
In other news, Imprima has put together an infographic highlighting the dangers of data loss and providing advice for protecting an organisation from such attacks.
The firm reveals that 78 per cent of organisations have experienced at least one data breach over the past two years and the UK is the fifth worst hit country for data attacks.
Check out the full infographic below:
