Saturday, September 13, 2014

U2: Why that 'free' album is dangerous as well as turgid

There's a good piece on The Register about why pushing an unwanted U2 album into people's faces is more than just impertinence:

Some have said that the offer would have been more palatable if a band with more "street cred" had been promoted.

But that's not really the point. Days before the U2 push, crooks were spamming fake Apple emails accusing marks of buying the film Lane Splitter on a computer or device that hadn’t previously been linked to their Apple ID. In reality it's not an Apple purchase notification, it's an attempt to trick users into handing over their Apple ID usernames and passwords to a phishing site, as Symantec details. The scam messages are distributed by the Kelihos botnet.

With Apple randomly messing with the contents of people's iTunes cloud libraries, this sort of email alert looks plausible: I just got a free album, maybe I just got a free film, victims may wonder. Celebrities had their private nude images spilled from their Apple iCloud accounts – have I been hacked too, others will ask when faced with an email notifying them of an unexpected purchase.
Apple want to trust us with using their products as an electronic wallet. Proving they can't be trusted with your keys doesn't seem a great idea right now.


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