This is a story about how eight men used Facebook to claim (and be paid) grants from the European Union for their cattle farms. The story fizzled out in 2013 and we want to know what happened. Does anyone know? (free content)
Last Wednesday, Malaysians voted to boot their sixth prime minister, Najib, out of office. As the new government set about being formed, it became clear that many senior appointments would be terminated and some not too kindly. Thursday and Friday were public holidays. Saturday and Sunday were days off. Today the head of the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission walked into his office and submitted his letter of resignation. (free content)
One has to wonder what is happening at FinCEN's media room. As if its abolition of the possessive apostrophe in its emails isn't illiterate enough, they often make no sense. Here's an example in which both the English (American, we should say) doesn't make sense and the subject matter is, well, bemusing. Here comes the tech bit..
FinCEN's biggest problem is that it is incredibly low profile and hardly anyone knows what it is or, even, in broad terms what it does. That's been its problem since its early days. For years it dined out on the single case that really hit the news: the Black Market Peso Exchange but that was old hat even in the late 1990s. Now it's got a new plan and it's aping, well, everyone else who wants to get their name in the papers. (free content)
On 20th November 2012, HP issued a press release saying "“HP is extremely disappointed to find that some former members of Autonomy’s management team used accounting improprieties, misrepresentations and disclosure failures to inflate the underlying financial metrics of the company, prior to Autonomy’s acquisition by HP." That started a large pile of poo rolling downhill and, as we found out this week, Sushovan Hussain, Autonomy's Chief Financial Officer, was at the bottom of that hill.
You'd have to be an idiot not to recognise this mail as spam. But that's not the dangerous bit. The spam is identified as containing malware Sanesecurity.Scam4.874.UNOFFICIAL (DO NOT search for it: read on for why). We wouldn't bother reporting another, simple, spam-scam but this one isn't simple and there's a whole ecosystem behind it that only multiple layers of security, working together at server level and at desktop level, were able to protect us from. That was where this writer did something stupid, thinking he was doing something interesting. This attack arrived with us within the past hour and is therefore currently active. **Free Content**
This is more than a little bit scary. A criminal, exactly what kind isn't clear, has been reading the major Australian employment website Seek.com.au - and then he (it's almost always a "he") is sending invitations to become involved in money laundering or, possibly, to be a victim of a long-established scheme to defraud his victims. The scam letter is a collection of so many currently trendy phrases that it might be convincing - especially to someone who is in awe of cryptocurrencies, blockchain (as they call it) and so many other trigger words. Oh, and there's an interesting twist to the old version of this crime.
We can't even be bothered to write about this amazing spam-scam. Just read it and weep - tears of laughter. Alexandra, supposedly at supportf@finditeasy.info, you are hereby nominated for a prize at the annual spam-scam awards.
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