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| Science & Technology |
| Facebook spies create false profile for top Nato chief to steal personal data |
| 2012-03-11 |
| Internet spies triggered a security scare at Nato and in Britain after creating a fake Facebook account of its most senior commander to harvest personal details from his high-level friends. Chinese hackers are thought to have been behind the plot, which saw a bogus page set up in the name of James Stavridis, Nato's Supreme Allied Commander. Among those caught up in the scam included top brass in the British military and MoD officials, who unwittingly accepted false 'friend requests' from the account. This, in turn, gave the hackers access to a mine of information, including e-mail addresses, names of family members, their movements and possibly even phone numbers, which could result in blackmail attempts. It could also lead to the hackers trying to crack passwords on classified files as personal information may have been used on encrypted systems, it was reported by The Sunday Telegraph. While it is highly unlikely any sensitive information would have been left on the social networking site by Nato staff, the incident is deeply embarrassing. Nato was told of the account late last year and got it taken down by Facebook. |
| Posted by:tipper |
| #2 I look forward to a company-ending class action lawsuit against this house of cards as a result of tens of That's better. |
| Posted by: Secret Asian Man 2012-03-11 18:53 |
| #1 In this day and age - of electronic governmental monitoring of personal activity, electronic payments and rampant identity theft - anyone who puts personal information on the internet is mildly retarded. Frankly, it's astonishing that an information sieve like Facebook has gotten so many individuals to cough up their personal details, and in so doing, attained a multi-billion dollar stock valuation. In future, I look forward to a company-ending class action lawsuit against this house of cards as a result of tens of thousands of Facebook dupes having their credit ruined by information thieves. Too bad the founders will have gotten their pound of flesh from deluded investors by then. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2012-03-11 14:56 |