As well as the major
stories in the news this week, there have been quite a few smaller items from
the UK that caught my eye, for different reasons.
'Sextortion'
Cyber blackmail is on
the increase. According to the police, webcam blackmail cases have doubled in
the last year, going from fewer than 400 to over 850. The NCA (National
Crime Agency) admit, however, that many of the victims don’t report the
crime, so actual numbers are likely to be far greater.
Contrary to what you
might expect, the majority of victims are males between 21 and 30, who are
befriended by fake identities on social media and persuaded to perform sexual
acts in front of their webcams.
The blackmailer will
then usually demand money or they will post the videos online, or share with
the victim’s friends, workmates, and family, in a moved dubbed ‘sextortion’.
It’s believed that online blackmail of this type has led to several suicides.
If you’re targeted,
the NCA advises not paying anything or communicating with the criminals, but to
take notes and screenshots of all messages, temporarily suspend your social
media accounts so the evidence is preserved, and report the incident both to
the police and to the social media site where the contact was made.
Gone in Six Seconds
I don’t know what kind
of courses they offer at Newcastle University, but experts there announced this
week that it’s possible to guess all the details necessary to crack your credit
card security in under six seconds, using a laptop and an internet connection.
They’ve developed a
technique called Distributed Guessing Attack, which feeds the card number simultaneously
into hundreds of websites and guesses the remaining details until it strikes
lucky by a process of elimination – something which usually takes around six
seconds. The researchers found that some credit card companies did not have
systems in place to detect multiple high-speed attempts.
Each website allows
often up to 20 attempts at inputting the required data, and by using up these
guesses on each site, the DGA software is able to very quickly piece together
the required information. Added to that is the fact that different sites often
ask for different info, so the cyber thief can piece it all together even
faster.
There is some
speculation that an attack of this type was used to hack the details of 9000
Tesco Bank customers in early November.
Going, Going … Almost Gone
It was reported this
week that a retired businessman, Minh To, found to his surprise that his
half-million-pound house was up for auction on the property sales website,
RightMove. If the man’s daughter, an estate agent, hadn’t called him only a few
days before the sale to ask where he was moving, he might never have discovered
the scheme.
Greater Manchester
Police traced four men who had raided Mr To’s postbox for utility bills and
used them to forge his signature and transfer the deeds of the house into their
ownership. This was possible because Mr To had paid off his mortgage, otherwise
the agreement of the bank involved would have been required.
New Money
Back in September, a
new polymer £5 note was launched in the UK, with Sir Winston Churchill on the
reverse. The new note was designed to be more robust than the previous paper
versions, but it hit the news this week when a vegetarian café in Cambridge
refused to accept the new note as it contains animal products.
An online petition has
already been launched in response to an outcry by vegans, vegetarians and some
faith groups, when it became known that the new fiver contains tallow, a form
of rendered fat from either cows or sheep.
The Australian
inventor of the process commented that the fuss was “absolutely stupid”
although the Bank of England claims it’s looking for a solution. Singer
Morrissey, meanwhile, has suggested that people donate their own bodies after
death to be used in the production process …
Not All Bad News
In keeping with the
‘leave ‘em laughing’ tradition of British news reports, my final piece is about
Craig Vaughan, a farmer in Teesside, whose Cocker spaniel, Dora, was stolen
along with her five puppies, while Mr Vaughan was busy milking his cows.
Mr Vaughan appealed
for help on social media tracing the dogs, and the news was shared up and down
the country. His hope was that it would be publicised enough to make it almost
impossible to sell the pups.
And on Wednesday, he
announced that a third party had intervened and managed to get the dogs back on
his behalf.
“Someone has done me a
massive favour and he wouldn’t take any money from me for them,” Mr Vaughan is
quoted as saying. “I cannot believe I have got them back. It just goes to show
you cannot beat the Great British public.”
I wonder if police are looking for Cruella Deville?
This week's Word of the
Week is stibogram, meaning a record
of footsteps, as opposed to ichnogram,
meaning a forensic record of footprints.
