BBC Hijacks PCs to Prove a Point

[ChocoFace]

It's creepy how i'm not surprised by this.

Work some time in tech-support, 1 or 2 months are easily enough, and you won't be surprised anymore. Firewalls and scanners can provide only so much security, if the user clicks on anything that pops up, security goes byebye.

I've seen programmers click on those "Your computer is infected"-popups and one would think that at least them know what they are doing when it comes to software...

so my status will go from not surprised to not surprised. hmph.

No. It will go from "It's creepy" to "Yeah, I expected that" or even "Wow, only 22k?"...

Oh. well, thanks for clearing that up.

 

[SmugFrog]

As an end result, the "infected" computers were removed from the bot-net and sent a message by the BBC telling them that their computer was insecure and how to fix it. No personal data was accessed on any of the infected computers.

If you're already receiving a healthy dose of spam, are you really going to pay attention to that email?

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

For those interested the 23 minute report is now up on the BBC website.

Right hand column here [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/7932816.stm].

The message from the BBC though wasn't so much as an email, as replacing their desktop background with a full screen warning. No half measures from our Auntie.