'I caught a virus from Murdoch's organ' – famous secret hooker Two prominent sex bloggers suspect the Rupert Murdoch owned Sunday Times of hacking into their computers using Trojan horse malware. The fears are not based on any hard evidence but are nonetheless sure to add further grist to the mill of the escalating News International hacking scandal. Zoe Margolis, author of the celebrated …
"Magnanti said that she relates the story only as a cautionary tale to others."
I'd have thought that the only cautionary tale from that quarter ought to be that shagging for cash, telling everyone on teh intahtoobs all the gory details and also expecting to remain anonymous is doomed to failure.
If you set out to put the unmasking of your nom de plume character into the "scoop of the year" category, you shouldn't act surprised when the whole of Fleet Street starts playing silly buggers around you.....
Still we all have off days.
But it's odd because I thought that creating a Trojan and mailing it to someone was supposed to be a crime? I guess maybe not if you're a newspaper reporter ... or an Israeli secret agent?
My own experience with newspaper reporters leads me to suggest that the the only sensible way to deal with them involves a cinder block and a hammer. Let them crawl away.
is a HTML link to a webserver you have access to. You send your targeted email to someone, they open it, and it tries to access the image on your webserver, and Bingo, you have their IP address.
Now IP address isnt a sure fire way of pinpointing someone, but unless the person your looking for is a little tech savvy (Which lets face it, most people arent), it will certainly provide somewere to start.
Its not illegal, unlike sending an actual trojan. It used to be used a lot in spamming and other Email direct marketing, so the spammers could see who actually openned the emails (And thus have a valid email address).
Its why most email readers wont automatically open images any more.
"Its why most email readers wont automatically open images any more."
One would hope, at least. Decent mail clients should allow the user to control exactly which resources should be opened and viewed, starting with plain text and then letting users elect to see formatting, local images, and ultimately remote resources if they should so wish, potentially being reminded of the privacy and security consequences.
Of course there's always some moron who claims that such control is against "what we need for corporate use" or "what the average user expects" and that mail clients should just show everything and magically cleanse the content with special pixie dust ($1000/oz from Microsoft's online store), but until the fundamental messaging architecture changes, caution is better than convenience.
Of course there's always some moron who claims that such control is against "what we need for corporate use"
The other usual suspect of register articles about RIPA violations throughout the last decade checks its internal droid compliance to the Hive Buzz by putting these into the weekly dose of mandatory propaganda.
If you do not show up on the web bug report you are flagged as potentially subversive and lose on your bonus. So if you happen to have that option turned off you actually have to go and open each and every article to ensure that the Hive does not perceive you as a threat.
Don't you just love companies like that?
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Web bugs in attachments have absolutely nothing to do with whether your mail program does or doesn't show email.
You can embed a web image in a document such as a word doc. There is no warning when the doc is opened, and the image is displayed (and hence reveals your IP to the remote server).
This happens in both MS Word and Open Office (before anyone decides to go off on one about Microsoft). I have a feeling it worked in Google Docs too, though it was a year or two ago so maybe that's changed.
Try it if you don't believe me. Embed a link to an image on your web site in a doc and send it to a friend, then ask them to open it and see if they see the image, and get no security warnings that the doc is trying to connect to a remote location.
Word and Open Office (and others if you ask me) need to fix this.
Everybody does it ....
Yes I'm afraid they do, it's only really apparent if you are on a network which blocks facebook et all. My work does this, and I've had to click OK to blocked link messages as many as EIGHTEEN times on a legitimate website page before my network has blocked All the crap. Even the financial times is at it
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