Posts Tagged ‘Kate Middleton’

Osama bin Laden dead – so watch for the spams and scams

Published by pratyushkp on May 3rd, 2011 - in Social, Technology
A still of 2004 Osama bin Laden video

Image via Wikipedia

Google‘s top-trending Anglophone search term right now is, understandably, “osama bin laden dead”.

Google officially describes its hotness (you couldn’t make this stuff up) as volcanic.

The short version, according to the LA Times, is that bin Laden was tracked to a “comfortable mansion surrounded by a high wall in a small town near Islamabad, Pakistan‘s capital.”

For bin Laden, it seems, the comfort is no more. “On Sunday, a ‘small team’ of Americans raided the compound. After a firefight, [President Obama], they killed Bin Laden.” Apparently, DNA tests have confirmed Bin Laden’s identity.

And there you have it.

Now you know the basics – but watch out for the links you’re likely to come across in email or on social networking sites offering you additional coverage of this newsworthy event.

Many of the links you see will be perfectly legitimate links. But at least some are almost certain to be dodgy links, deliberately distributed to trick you into hostile internet territory.

If in doubt, leave it out!

Sometimes, poisoned content is rather obvious. The links in this spam captured by SophosLabs, for example, give the impression of going to a news site:

The links don’t go anywhere of the sort, of course. Wherever you click, you end up finding out how to replace your tired old windows:

But even well-meant searches using your favourite search engine might end in tears.

What’s commonly called “Black-Hat Search Engine Optimisation” (BH-SEO) means that cybercrooks can often trick the secret search-ranking algorithms of popular search engines by feeding them fake pages to make their rotten content seem legitimate, and to trick you into visiting pages which have your worst interests at heart.

Well-known topics that have been widely written about for years are hard to poison via BH-SEO. The search engines have a good historical sense of which sites are likely to be genuinely relevant if your interest is searches like “Commonwealth of Australia“, “Canadian Pacific Railway” or “Early history of spam”.

But a search term which is incredibly popular but by its very nature brand new – “Japanese tsunami”, “William and Kate engagement”, “Kate Middleton wedding dress” or, of course, “Osama bin Laden dead” – doesn’t give the search engines much historical evidence to go on.

Of course, the search engines want to be known for being highly responsive to new trends – that means more advertising revenue for them, after all – and that means, loosely speaking, that they have to take more of a chance on accuracy.

What can you do to keep safe?

* Don’t blindly trust links you see online, whether in emails, on social networking sites, or from searches. If the URL and the subject matter don’t tie up in some obvious way, give it a miss.

* Use an endpoint security product which offers some sort of web filtering so you get early warning of poisoned content. (Sophos Endpoint Security and Control and the Sophos Web Appliance are two examples.)

* If you go to a site expecting to see information on a specific topic but get redirected somewhere unexpected – to a “click here for a free security scan” page, for instance, or to a survey site, or to a “download this codec program to view the video” dialog – then get out of there at once. Don’t click further. You’re being scammed.

Source :- http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com

  • Osama bin Laden dead – so watch for the spams and scams (nakedsecurity.sophos.com)
  • Osama bin Laden scams on Facebook (securitybloggersnetwork.com)
  • Osama Bin Laden’s Death Targeted by Malware Creators [ALERT] (mashable.com)
  • The Death Of Osama Bin Laden (injesus.wordpress.com)
  • (Video) Corbett: ‘Osama Bin Laden a CIA asset’ (politicore.wordpress.com)
  • Osama bin Laden Has Been Killed; President Obama Announces Osama bin Laden has be Killed (sugarslam.com)
  • Osama Bin Laden Dead – Top Search On Google (seroundtable.com)
  • Scammers Use Osama Bin Laden’s Death To Spread Malware On Facebook, Google (huffingtonpost.com)
  • Why that photo of a dead Osama bin Laden is a photoshopped fake (promoteliberty.wordpress.com)
  • Scam warning: Shocking NEW VIDEO of Osama Bin Ladens DEATH!! (zdnet.com)

Royal Wedding Chatter Amps Up on Facebook, Twitter [STATS]

Published by pratyushkp on April 28th, 2011 - in Social

One hardly need look at the numbers to know that talk of the Royal Wedding is accelerating rapidly ahead of the April 29 event. The numbers are nevertheless enlightening, especially in light of where and among whom conversations about the Royal Wedding are occurring.

News stories (as indexed by Bing) are up nearly sevenfold to 7 million per day since the beginning of the month. Blog posts have more than doubled from 46.7 million on April 5 to 102.9 million, according to data obtained from Trendrr.

According to Nielsen, the Royal Wedding has made up more than 0.3% of all news coverage in the U.S. since the engagement was announced. YouTube videos tagged with top Royal Wedding-related keywords (Royal Wedding, Kate Middleton, etc.) have grown more than 10 times from 37.5k per day to 460k per day.

Perhaps the most amusing is the rise in Royal Wedding-related eBay auctions, up from 7,435 in mid-February to more than 400,000 this week.

Just as with the U.S. media, more of the American public is talking about the Royal Wedding than their U.K. counterparts. 40% of Royal Wedding-related, English language tweets originate from the U.S., followed by the UK (31%), Canada (8%), Australia (6%), Indonesia (4%) and India (3%), Trendrr finds.

Interestingly, on a per capita basis, most tweets are originating from small American towns, such as New Haven, CT; Lubbock, TX; and Tulsa, OK, rather than big cities.

Overall, tweets about the Royal Wedding have quadrupled since the beginning of the month, averaging nearly 5,000 per hour over the last week and accelerating quickly in recent days. Sentiment has been mixed; 46% of tweets are positive, 43% are neutral and 12% are negative.

A Trendrr spokesperson says that the data has been difficult to track because of the volume and range of topics related to the wedding. The data doesn’t include, for instance, mentions of Kate’s ring, because tweets with the keywords “#Kate” and “ring” don’t necessarily refer to Kate Middleton. Including them would “spoil the data pools,” he said, meaning that actual discussion related to the event is undoubtedly much greater.

Thumbnail courtesy of Flickr, The British Monarchy

Source  -: http://mashable.com

  • Royal Wedding Chatter Amps Up on Facebook, Twitter [STATS] (mashable.com)
  • Not the royal wedding: an etiquette guide for the Middletons (exitlanguages.wordpress.com)
  • Twitter prepare their servers for the Royal Wedding (chatootsboots.wordpress.com)
  • At Royal Wedding Queen Supplies Flowers for the Church (treehugger.com)
  • Construction gets Royal Wedding fever (train4tradeskills.wordpress.com)
  • Royal Wedding: Meet the Superfans! (eonline.com)
  • No Tweets Allowed at the Royal Wedding (mashable.com)
  • Celebrate the royal wedding in style (interflora.co.uk)
  • Biggest online event is Royal Wedding! (telecomaustralia.wordpress.com)
  • A Different Kind of Royal Wedding! (afashionablelifeforme.wordpress.com)
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