Want Personal Data? Go Phish!

At least 2 million people received the email May 16 2013 notifying them that an order they had just made on "Wallmart's" website was being processed, though none of them had done any such thing.

Still, thousands of people clicked on the link in the email, taking many of them to a harmless Google search results page for "Walmart." Others weren't so fortunate.

The link led to the invisible download of malware that covertly infected their personal computers, turning them into remotely controlled robots for hackers.

Phishing, also known as “brand spoofing” or “carding”, is a term used to describe various scams that use (primarily) fraudulent e-mail messages, sent by criminals, to trick you into divulging personal information. The criminals use this information to steal your identity, rob your bank account, or take over your computer.

With spear-phishing they use social engineering – researching social media and other publicly available online sources – to profile high value targets and personalize bogus emails. Broader phishing campaigns may engage partners in crime to conduct high volume mailings, but very realistic looking emails will invariably hook a significant number of users who will download a malformed spreadsheet or click on a link to a fraudulent website.

Make no mistake, phishing and spear-phishing works. RSA recently reported that in 2013 there were nearly 450,000 phishing attacks and estimated losses of over $5.9 billion.

Even before phishing became so prevalent, legitimate businesses and financial institutions would hardly ever ask for personal information via e-mail. If you receive such a request, call the organization and ask if it's legitimate or check its legitimate Web site. Look for misspellings and bad grammar. While an occasional typo can slip by any organization, more than one is a tip-off to beware.

In the fake-Wal-Mart attack, people missed clear warning signs — such as the company name being misspelled and the sender's address being very long and strange.

The success of phishing is largely determined by the low levels of user-awareness regarding how the companies which fraudsters try to imitate, operate. Many legitimate sites contain special warnings saying that they never ask users to send confidential data in messages. However, users continue to send their passwords to phishers.

Phishing is a modern hydra, cut of one head and two more grows out. The only way to actually combat phishing is with awareness and to starve it out. I personally think this is a result of the young age of the Internet; people are simply not accustomed to online scammers the same way we are local market hustlers. In a few years phishing and scamming will probably have malnourished itself out of existence, but until then we all need to be aware. 

Please don't feed the phish. 

Google's expanding their AI Mind

Google is expanding its ambitions in Artificial Intelligence with the acquisition of AI company DeepMind for a reported $400 million.

It’s no secret that Google has an interest in AI; after all, technologies derived from AI research help fuel Google’s core search and advertising businesses. AI also plays a key role in Google’s mobile services, its autonomous cars, and its growing stable of robotics technologies.

With the addition of futurist Ray Kurzweil to its ranks in 2012, Google also has the grandfather of “strong AI” on board, a man who forecasts that intelligent machines may exist by midcentury.

If all this sounds troubling, don’t worry: Google’s acquisition of DeepMind isn’t about fusing a mechanical brain with faster-than-human robots and giving birth to the misanthropic Skynet computer network from the Terminator franchise.

DeepMind's Web site describes the London-based company as "cutting edge" and specializing in combining "the best techniques from machine learning and systems neuroscience to build powerful general-purpose learning algorithms." The site says the company's initial commercial applications are simulations, e-commerce, and games.

Google has been particularly focused on advances in artificial intelligence recently. Scientists working on the company's secretive X Labs created a neural network for machine learning by connecting 16,000 computer processors and then unleashed it on the Internet. The network's performance exceeded researchers' expectations, doubling its accuracy rate in identifying objects from a list of 20,000 items.

I wrote about Artificial Intelligence as a part of my article series The Conscious Internet. Do you think the age of Artificial Intelligence is upon us? Comment below...

Handshaking 101

I have to many times, both in this business world and outside of it, met people who just don’t know how to shake hands. Often you can’t put your finger on it, but you know there is something wrong with this person because of the way he/she shakes hands. Premature hugging is something else, not to be covered here, but likewise as odd.

The result of a bad handshake is that you are forever going to look at that person with a bit of skepticism. “Sure, he delivers on every occasion, but THAT handshake … “ This is just not going to fly. To help you novice handshakers out there here’s a few handshakes you may want to avoid:

1. The sweaty slip – some people have a natural tendency to get sweaty hands and many get them when they are nervous, that’s just normal. It can make shaking hands tricky in stressful situations such as job interviews. However, I think there is no excuse for a wet, slobby handshake. If you get sweaty hands simply dry them on a piece of clothing before shaking someone’s hand. It’s just the only courteous thing to do. 
2. The limp fish - not gripping the other person’s hand firm enough and then shaking from your wrist is a big mistake because the messages I receive about the other person doing that include: ‘I am not confident’ or ‘I am a push-over’. 
3. The pinch – when someone pinches your fingers with their fingers. This is maybe something the Queen does, but has no place in real life. Again, this half-hearted handshake sends me signals like ‘I am not bothered about shaking your hands properly’ or ‘I don’t think you deserve a proper handshake’. 
4. The hand-holder – where the person shaking your hand keeps holding on and thinks he is actually holding hands with you rather than shaking hands. After anything more than 3 shakes my natural instinct tells me to pull my hand back and say ‘let go, why are we holding hands now?’ My mind is then suddenly preoccupied with forcing myself not to pull my hand away, which means I am no longer concentrating on the introduction or anything the other person is saying.
5. The avoider – someone that doesn’t make eye contact when they shake your hand or someone that pulls their hand away too quickly. This again signals to me that they are either under-confident, very shy, or they don’t really want to meet me or shake my hand. 
6. The crushing gripper – when you shake someone’s hand and it feels like they are crushing every single bone in your hand. A hand shake that is too firm will make anyone feel uncomfortable. It makes you think ‘is the person trying to hurt me on purpose?’ and triggers a natural ‘I need to run away’ instinct.

Facebook buys WhatsApp

Social network giant Facebook grows by acquiring Whats App, a messaging service for smartphones with 450 million users. The purchase price is set to $19 billion. Approximately $4 billion paid in cash, the rest is to be paid in Facebook shares.

WhatsApps founder Jan Koum will thus become a major shareholder in Facebook. He will also take place in the social network's board of directors.

Facebook have likely made the acquisition because they lack an operating system of its own, such as Google's Android or Apple's iOS. With its own operating system, Facebook can now pre-install apps, and programs and by doing so bring up the use of its own products.

Facebooks previous attempts to market it 's own user OS Home, which could be installed to Android, fell flat and become a flop. Facebook is now seemingly trying to redeem this venture.

After the announcement Facebook 's stock fell 4.4 percent, signaling that the market apparently doesn't share Zuckerberg's interest in WhatsApp. 

9 years and counting!

Last week, on Valentines Day, YouTube celebrated its 9th birthday. Launched on February 14th, 2005, YouTube has skyrocketed to be the biggest, most popular video sharing site in the world. With parent company Google, YouTube is a massive part of many people’s daily lives. Before YouTube, in order for something to go viral it probably meant a flu epidemic, now it can be a cat video or a drugged up kid fresh from the dentist. I can’t imagine a time before YouTube, it has become such a phenom, so happy birthday YouTube.

In order to celebrate this occasion I collected some interesting YouTube facts. Enjoy!

• 60 hours of video are uploaded every minute, or one hour of video is uploaded to YouTube every second.
• Over 4 billion videos are viewed a day
• Over 800 million unique users visit YouTube each month
• Over 3 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube
• More video is uploaded to YouTube in one month than the 3 major US networks created in 60 years
• 70% of YouTube traffic comes from outside the US
• YouTube is localized in 39 countries and across 54 languages
• In 2011, YouTube had more than 1 trillion views
• In 2011 there were almost 140 views for every person on Earth
• Created in 2007, the YouTube partner program now has 30,000+ partners from 27 countries around the world
• YouTube pays out millions of dollars a year to partners
• Hundreds of partners are making six figures a year
• Partner revenue has more than doubled for four years in a row
• YouTube is monetizing over 3 billion video views per week globally
• 98 of AdAge’s Top 100 advertisers have run campaigns on YouTube and the Google Display Network
• Hundreds of advertisers are using TrueView in-stream and 60% of our in-stream ads are now skippable
• YouTube has more HD content than any other online video site
• There are thousands of full-length movies on YouTube
• 10% of YouTube’s videos are available in HD
• YouTube mobile gets over 600 million views a day
• Traffic from mobile devices tripled in 2011
• The YouTube player is embedded across tens of millions of websites

Giant Phone Replica Celebrates 100 Years

A giant, fully-functional replica of an old L.M. Ericsson table top phone celebrates 100 years this week. It was built as a marketing ploy, and reinvented several times during its lifetime.

In 1923 the replica was the centerpiece of the company’s stand at the Gothenburg Exhibition. As described in Ericsson Review, it was “an attraction towards which visitors could not help turning their eyes.”

The telephone housed a complete, fully automatic Ericsson system for 500 lines, to which a few telephones were actually connected. Visitors could experiment, make calls and watch the switching process through the plate-glass windows. The Ericsson Review reports that the demonstrations attracted long lines of visitors every day.

Crash Imminent?

MarketWatch recently reported on a particularly alarming correlation between the Dow Jones Industrial Average for the period 1928-1929 and 2013-2014. Curves is hauntingly similar, and if there was any correlation the New York Stock Exchange is set to crash any minute now.

Now there is by all means a lot of skepticism and more positive experts think that this connection does not exist at all, and that the market situation is completely different.

Tom McClellan, the man behind the McClellan Market Report, notes to the site:

"....there is no guarantee that the market has to continue following through with every step of the 1929 pattern. But between now and May 2014, there is plenty of reason for caution."

The picture isn’t pretty. And it’s not as easy as one might think to wriggle out from underneath the bearish significance of this chart.

One of the market gurus responsible for widely publicizing this chart is hedge-fund manager Doug Kass, of Seabreeze Partners and CNBC fame. In an email earlier this week, Kass wrote of the parallels with 1928-29: “While investment history doesn’t necessarily repeat itself, it does rhyme.” And, based on a number of indicators rather than just this chart drawing the 1928-29 parallel, he believes that “the correction might have just started.”

You may still be inclined to dismiss this. But there were many more were laughing last November when this scary chart began circulating. Not as many are laughing now.