Hackers to Target Media Players
October 2, 2007 – 5:43 pm
Internet Criminals are always thinking of new ways to scam users or hack their machines. And what concerns them the most is mass efficiency. Having a method that could work in a situation or two is not something efficient, cyber-crooks are looking for magic bullets. They’re trying to deploy tactics that will enable them to get to as many users as possible. So, how do they hit the maximum number of people? Well, there are two ways in which they can go about this – they can use bots to send viruses to each and every user, or they can plant a single virus in a place on the web that attracts a lot of people.
So, what attracts people on the web now? Well.. with the evolution of the net, one of the most attractive things for users out there are movies. Hackers are evolving, just for the reason I stated earlier – they want to become more efficient, thus gain more money. And as Chris Rouland (chief technology officer for IBM Corp.’s Internet Security Systems unit) stated for the Associated Press, “The next logical step seems to be the media players”
Video-related hacking is not something very common now, but it’s bound to get more “fans” since it has a lot of potential. Just think of the tricks they could use. For example, the creation of trusted videos, or taking over trusted ones. A lot of stuff can be rated on the web and you can’t know for sure if it’s for real or if it’s all fake. In this way, hackers can upload a video that would somehow help them in their schemes and get a lot of bots to vote the movie as “great” or “trusted” or something else, thus fooling users into clicking it and facing security issues. Another thing they could do is hack a video that is already very popular and trusted. In addition, another smart tactic would be placing a malicious seed in a single video (probably the most popular one) in a series of videos, while the other in the series would be clean.
As you can see, I came up with three ideas, and I’m no hacker, I’m just a journalist – so, these guys could do some serious damage, should they turn to media players and employ even more complicated tactics!
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