ITForum Barcelona – Last day

Tags van Technorati: rbn,community. malware. spyware,anatomy of a hack,jesper johansson,mvp,itforum

I know it the event was last week but up until now I have been very busy working on the current nominations and it is keeping me of the streets :)

On the last day I spend all day at the MVP Booth in the community area of the exhibition. During the day I had the pleasure to receive a personal demo/presentation from Jesper Johansson on Anatomy of a Hack.

During this session Jesper showed how much work “the people who try to lure you into buying stuff from them or even give you information such as credit card numbers and more” put into their projects.

Sure, most of the hacks or deceiving is only able to work when users allow things to happen. in the older days you would see many spelling errors and or other mistakes that immediately alerted anyone not to use or click the message/warning. Nowadays the effort in the programming of these deceivers becomes almost as good normal programs and even for the trained IT professional it is hard to see.

A question Jesper asks his audience during the session in which he demos during a simple visit to a website and actually falling for the trap that shows how sophisticated it became during the last few years is “How many of you would fall for this? ” – remember these are IT professionals – and some of them actually have to admit they would fall for it. The next question he asks is about family and parents they think would fall for it and the response is almost 100%.

The 100% is frightening and made me think that we as IT professionals have a duty to inform and help our fellow PC users to understand and learn how to prevent these people from making money!

I shamefully admit that I’m also a bit numb from all the extra pictures/popup fake mails etc I get and pay less attention I should by just clicking them away. I also admit I pretend to think those sites run from Russian beyond our control domains and thus an action is lacking from my side.

In the upcoming period (not during nominations :)) I will spend some more on the topic as I think we as a community have a great opportunity.

I call upon my fellow PC users who are savvy enough to help others to prevent the Russian Business Network stealing from us.