oregonnerd: differing views

Interesting new hacking fraud

June 12, 2008 at 8:47 am Leave a comment

This one is in South Africa, and involves cyberfraud and the government.  I’ve actually been arguing for a while that the old dumb terminal/mainframe scheme makes sense in a lot of situations.  It would allow for mass filters.  Mind you, it would also allow extensive data-mining techniques…but that’s more a matter of visibility than actuality.  And more people would be in on it.

Anyway, what they did–“they” being a varied group of people, including those inside the government–was stick ‘a piece of kit’ (that’s a Britishism I remember as generic) about the size of a memory stick on PCs and then capture data.  Spyware and adware are mentioned, so there would presumably be some actual software invasion involved rather than the capture of data from a port. 

Oh–the take mentioned, in USD, is nearly $25 million.

–Glenn

Entry filed under: current news. Tags: scam, scheme, south african.