Call It Flat Pack Spam

By Digital Trends Staff January 23, 2008

Call It Flat Pack Spam It’s bad enough when you have to put together a piece of flat pack from Ikea. All those screws, making sure you have each piece the right wayround…then taking it apart again when you realize you’ve made a mistake. It’s made furniture cheaper, but far more stressful. More recently, though, the company hasunwittingly been putting a different kind of stress in peoples’ live, according to a Vnunet report. It turns out there was a large hole in itssecurity that gave hackers access to its servers, letting them bulk mail spam and malware from the Ikea address. The incident was discovered by security company Tier-3. Given the legitimate address, the spam wouldn’t have been caught by most e-mail filters. Among the malware sent were zero-day Trojans and root kitTrojans. Geoff Sweeney, CTO at Tier-3, explained, "Ikea’s problems were caused because the contact template on the firm’s home page was inadequately secured, allowing hackers toinsert alternative email addresses in a contact form. This basically allowed anyone with a little technical knowledge to generate millions of phishing and/or spam messages from Ikea’s mail serversusing a simple script." Remarkably, it took Ikea five days to close the hole after they’d been informed about it. Maybe they couldn’t find the Allen wrench.

Editors' Recommendations

Digital Trends Staff

Digital Trends has a simple mission: to help readers easily understand how tech affects the way they live. We are your…

Computing

Google CEO Sundar Pichai warns of dangers of A.I. and calls for more regulation

Google & Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai

Citing concerns about the rise of deepfakes and the potential abuses of facial recognition technology, Google CEO Sundar Pichai declared in an op-ed in the Financial Times that artificial intelligence should be more tightly regulated: "We need to be clear-eyed about what could go wrong" with A.I., Pichai wrote.

The Alphabet and Google executive wrote about the positive developments that A.I. can bring, such as recent work by Google finding that A.I. can detect breast cancer more accurately than doctors, or Google's project to use A.I. to more accurately predict rainfall in local areas. But he also warned that "history is full of examples of how technology’s virtues aren’t guaranteed" and that "[t]he internet made it possible to connect with anyone and get information from anywhere, but also easier for misinformation to spread."

Computing

Your favorite calendar apps can also get spam. Here’s how to block or report it

calendar on iPad next to macbook and mac keyboard

It turns out emails aren’t the only form of spam you need to worry about. There’s a not-so-new form of spam that has recently resurfaced that targets your favorite calendar apps. Calendar spam is a form of phishing in which spammy calendar events and invites are sent to you via your calendar service (like Google Calendar or iCloud calendar). These spammy calendar events usually feature phishing links that when clicked on may prompt you to divulge sensitive financial information.

Security firm Kaspersky first noted this form of spam in a blog post published on Monday, June 10. In a brief description of calendar spam, as it occurs in Google Calendar, Kaspersky also mentioned that, in addition to phishing links, calendar spam can also show up as fake polls in Google Calendar.

Computing

YouTube purges extremist videos, from flat-earthers to Holocaust denial

YouTube announced further steps it plans to take toward reducing the amount of harmful content published on its site.

The video-sharing site published a statement on Wednesday, June 5, that outlined its plans to remove “more hateful and supremacist content” from its platform. Specifically targeting hate speech, the statement went on to say that YouTube’s updated video removal policy will include “prohibiting videos alleging that a group is superior in order to justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion based on qualities like age, gender, race, caste, religion, sexual orientation or veteran status. This would include, for example, videos that promote or glorify Nazi ideology, which is inherently discriminatory.”
In addition to removing videos that feature supremacist views, YouTube also intends to remove videos that deny the existence of “well-documented violent events, like the Holocaust or the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary.” The video publishing platform also said it would crack down on videos claiming the Earth is flat or promising miracle cures for diseases.
YouTube’s updated policies also include reducing the spread of content it deems “borderline” or more specifically, content that generally contains harmful false information such as “videos promoting a phony miracle cure for a serious illness, or claiming the earth is flat.” But instead of removing borderline content, YouTube is opting to use a different approach to reduce the number of views borderline videos receive. Specifically, a system update that limits recommendations of that content in the first place. The system update was tested in the United States in January and YouTube intends to bring the update to more countries by the end of this year. YouTube also plans to increase the recommendations for content created by authoritative sources, like trusted news organizations.