As the Occupy Wall Street movement continues, hackers have turned to attacking some of the financial institutions protesters feel are responsible for their situation. The web page representing Bank of America on the Google Plus service gives the appearance that it was hacked. It does not appear this page was actually controlled by Bank of America (BoA), rather it seems to have been created by the attackers by tricking Google into giving them a business page under BoA's name.
The attackers have put quite a bit of effort into painting BoA in a bad light. They have posted at least 10 articles which say things like: "Living under a tarp? I am too. My TARP is much bigger, however, and billions of dollars more expensive."
The shenanigans appear to have started on November 8th, right after Google launched the official service for businesses to use the social network. We have not seen a lot of abuse on the Google Plus service to date, but I am sure this incident is just the tip of the iceberg. Google may have a real names only policy, but apparently their verification process leaves something to be desired.
Update: Google have removed the bogus page and handed it over to Bank of America. They have also included a "verified" check mark similar to what Twitter uses. Strangely not all business pages have this verified mark, including BoA's competitor Citibank USA.
The attackers have put quite a bit of effort into painting BoA in a bad light. They have posted at least 10 articles which say things like: "Living under a tarp? I am too. My TARP is much bigger, however, and billions of dollars more expensive."
The shenanigans appear to have started on November 8th, right after Google launched the official service for businesses to use the social network. We have not seen a lot of abuse on the Google Plus service to date, but I am sure this incident is just the tip of the iceberg. Google may have a real names only policy, but apparently their verification process leaves something to be desired.
Creative Commons photo of Bank of Foreclosed courtesy of scad_lo's Flickr photostream'.
Update: Google have removed the bogus page and handed it over to Bank of America. They have also included a "verified" check mark similar to what Twitter uses. Strangely not all business pages have this verified mark, including BoA's competitor Citibank USA.
0 comments:
Post a Comment