Beware Nanny / Au Pair scams spread via spam email

          It's time to hang up my spurs as a Naked Security writer, as I have been offered an exciting new career as a nanny. I must admit it took me by surprise when the email offering me the position arrived in my inbox, but when I read the details of the job they were offering it seemed too good to be true.

• A starting wage of £2700 per month, plus £700 per week for "petty expenses" - with room for negotiation upon starting.
• My own private well-furnished master bedroom, with laptop, internet connection, TV and "other necessary gadgets".
• Freedom to study in any school of my choice, with tuition fees all paid for.
• Don't have to work at weekends, so free to explore London or hang-out with other well-paid nannies.

          Surely I would be crazy to turn this job down? There can't be many nannies being offered an annual salary of £32,400 (with an additional £36,400 for petty expenses!) just for carting a couple of kids to school every weekday. Not forgetting the internet connection and paid-for tuition fees too. I wonder how they selected me out of all of the email addresses on the internet? Here's one section of the email:

SCHEDULE
Your job is not a hard one,I do not believe in supervising or monitoring people to do their job.I believe people should be giving a free role in whatever they do.So,I believe you should be able to perform well without being told.All entails preparing Our kids for schooling in the morning,taking them to the point where the school bus picks them up to school.You will have a free period then whereby you can do any vocation or practice whatever is at your disposal.Then you help monitor them after they are brought home by the school bus,just to make sure they are alright till my wife's arrival from work.
SALARY
You will be entitled to a pay of 2700pounds every month while you will also be given an entitlement of 700pounds every week for petty expenses which you might need for yourself.This salary is subject to negotiations for an upward review upon your arrival.
ROOM
A well furnished Master bed room will be made available for your personal use soon as you get here.there will be your personal laptop connected to the internet, TV and other necessary gadgets at your disposal.There will be enough privacy for you,i guess you'll really like it.

          Of course, for anyone who hasn't realised already, it's a scam. If you respond to the email, the scammer will ask you for all sorts of personal information. That could be bad enough - but things can get even more sneaky with nanny/au pair scams.

          For instance, the prospective employer might send you an advance payment which they tell you to put in your bank account. However, before the cheque has cleared you receive a message from the scammer saying that some terrible tragedy has occurred (maybe his wife and children have been killed by a runaway steam roller) and that he no longer requires your services.

          Would you mind awfully, asks the poor grief-stricken scammer, wiring most of the money back to him. Perhaps via Western Union to resolve his personal situation as quickly as possible. Thinking that you have received his cheque, and assuming it will clear into your account, you send the scammer money and are ultimately left with a hole in your finances.

          Once again, the old adage applies. Just because something is written in a nicely proportioned font, doesn't mean that it's true. Stop believing everything you read on the internet and keep your wits about you.
Otherwise, you could fall victim to an email scam.

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Hacker who bypassed Facebook security pleads guilty

          A British student has pleaded guilty to charges that he breached security at Facebook earlier his year, despite arguing that his intentions were not malicious. York computer science student Glenn Steven Mangham, 26, attempted to bypass security on the company's internal systems, raising alarm amongst the FBI that industrial espionage was occurring, according to media reports.

         Mangham, who had previously been rewarded by Yahoo for finding vulnerabilities in its systems, discovered that Facebook was far from amused by his activities. The social networking giant discovered evidence that pointed back to Mangham and he was arrested by the Metropolitan Police Central e-Crime Unit (PCeU) in June.

         Specifically, Mangham was accused of using a computer program to secure unauthorized access to Facebook, of attempting to hack into Facebook's Mailman server (used to run internal and external email lists), and attempting to secure access to the Facebook Phabricator server used by internal developers.
Southwark Crown Court was told Mangham produced software scripts that could hack into Facebook's Phabricator server to download "highly sensitive intellectual property".

         In addition, the student was said to have breached a webserver used by Facebook to set software development puzzles to programmers who might be interested in working for the company. Mangham's defence team has argued that he was an "ethical" or "white-hat" hacker, whose intentions - rather than being malicious - were to uncover security vulnerabilities at Facebook with the intention of getting them fixed.

Facebook users will be relieved to hear that the social network told BBC News that the attack "did not involve an attempt to compromise or access user data."

         Thank goodness for that. Of course, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's past is not necessarily entirely squeaky clean itself. In the past, he has been accused of hacking into a rival social network, breaking into journalists' email accounts, and calling Facebook's early adopters "dumb f**ks" for sharing their email addresses, photos and other personal information.

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Windows Phone 7.5 susceptible to SMS hack

          Phones running Microsoft's newly released Windows Phone 7.5 mobile operating system are vulnerable to having their text messaging service's knees kicked off in a denial of service attack. The flaw is simple as pie to exploit: An attacker simply sends an SMS to a Windows Phone user. According to WinRumors's tests, Windows Phone 7.5 devices will reboot, but the messaging hub will fail to load even after multiple attempts.

           WinRumors's Tom Warren reported that they tested the attack on a range of Windows Phone devices, including HTC’s TITAN and Samsung’s Focus Flash, with some of the devices running the 7740 version of Windows Phone 7.5 and others on Mango RTM build 7720. The bug isn't fussy about which device you have, Warren says; rather, it comes down to how the Windows Phone messaging hub handles messages. He notes that messages sent via Facebook chat or Windows Live Messenger also trigger the bug.

WinRumors reported that the flaw was discovered by Khaled Salameh, a self-proclaimed "geek" from Jordan who reported it to the blog on Monday.

WinRumors's Warren says the flaw seeps out to pollute other nooks and crannies in the Windows phone operating system, as well. To wit:

If a user has pinned a friend as a live tile on their device and the friend posts a particular message on Facebook then the live tile will update and causes the device to lock up. Thankfully there’s a workaround for the live tile issue, at initial boot up you have a small amount of time to get past the lock screen and into the home screen to remove the pinned live tile before it flips over and locks the device.

WinRumors is now disclosing the bug to Microsoft in cooperation with Khaled but reported that there doesn't yet seem to be a workaround to fix the messaging hub, aside from a hard device reset and wiping the device.

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