Happy belated 4th of July, readers! Hopefully all of your festivities went off without a hitch, as naturally with every year, some people get a little too happy with their fireworks. Yesterday, among all the celebration, I saw a lot of news about the internet practically going haywire. Apparently hackers have been having a field day right under our noses and giving a lot of us even more reason to be paranoid about just what we put out there. So naturally, some good wholesome fun would have been a good change of pace for those of us who were on the bad end of a financial attack, or some well placed trolling.
Good old YouTube was the victim of some severe trolling. Naturally most of the news is laying the blame squarely on 4chan. I've also heard some sparce mention of ebaumsworld as well, though it was 4chan that's practically declared cultural war on Justin Bieber, and most of the YouTube shenanigans were Bieber-related. What seems to have happened is a net-savvy user happened upon a vulnerability in the comment system. The bug allowed users to bypass the HTML restrictions in place on the comment box. Now letting a prankster that's decent at HTML practically run wild on YouTube is like opening Pandora's box, especially when it's anon getting involved. People were logging on expecting to see what they intended to see and things were happening ranging from popups, to shock site redirects. To alleviate the situation Google temporarily disabled comments until they could isolate and fix the bug. In the meantime, I'm sure 4chan is cooking up their next plot to "shake the foundation of the internet." Gotta love these crazy kids.
There's been a lot of drama surrounding Apple lately as well and with this recent bit of news, it's only looking worse. When YouTube got hacked, it was all fun and games. When the AppStore gets hacked, it's time for users to get worried. A rouge developer found an exploit that blows the door to your iTunes account wide open for the commencement of a field day. What was first thought to just be the entity known as "Thuat Nguyen", turns out to be several people practically farming money out of accounts worldwide. People have been reporting having lost anywhere between $100 to over $1,000 on apps that they didn't buy. This isn't only harming the consumer, as these apps in question are shooting to the top of the charts, taking the limelight away from developers that deserve to be recognized. Apple's response to the problem thus far? "Change your password." For something that seems to have been happening for a month, there needs to be more action taken out. I personally removed my credit card from my iTunes account, and do not plan on making any more purchases until a little something more has been done to safeguard my information. In the meantime, all one can do is stay educated on the situation. One thing is for sure, Apple's got a LOT of face-saving to do in the wake of all this.
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