Writing in the latest edition of Vanity Fair, Kurt Eichenwald states that Facebook has "quietly been pioneering a marketing business model unlike any other" and goes on to praise the social networking Goliath for developing new targeting techniques that give "advertisers an unprecedented ability to reach only the potential audiences they want". Eichenwald comes to this conclusion, he says, following months of interviews with Facebook advertising clients, investors and key executives from Facebook itself.
The picture painted by Eichenwald in Vanity Fair is of a business which has pretty much revolutionised the marketing and advertising space online, and reinvented itself as a result. He talks of the kind of insight that Facebook can deliver to advertisers in order to enable them to deliver highly targeted messages at just the right time, such as tracking down "potential buyers at any point along the purchasing path" with an example used of Facebook users having checked travel prices without completing an order being able to be hit with ads "urging them to pull the trigger on buying".
It all sounds, from the advertising executive perspective at least, like marketing heaven. So why do I feel like I am in some kind of perpetual Facebook advertising hell instead? Seriously, quite where all this clever stuff comes into play I am at a loss to comprehend based upon the adverts that target me. I am vegan, an animal rights activist, an award winning IT security journalist, wear an eye patch and have more …
The PR company sending the release were at pains to point out that "this latest discovery is perhaps the first serious wave of targeted attacks using Android malware in-the-wild against Tibetan and Uyghur activists" and that "the malware secretly reports the infection to a command-and-control server. After that, it begins to harvest information stored on the device". The stolen data including contacts as stored on the phone and any associated SIM card, call logs, SMS messages, geolocation data, phone handset data such as phone number, OS version, phone model and SDK version. The release itself starts by stating how this is a similar attack style as others aimed at Uyghur and Tibetan activists, but targeting mobile devices instead of DOC, XLS or PDF documents exploiting zero-days for Windows computers and Macs.
The KCNA claims that the attacks, which are believed to have taken down official state websites such as KCNA itself, were targeted to coincide with the military drills by the US and South Korea. Calling the attack cowardly and despicable, KCNA went on to insist that the "US and South Korean puppet regime are massively bolstering up cyber forces in a bid to intensify the subversive activities and sabotages against the DPRK". The KCNA statement went on to claim that "intensive and persistent virus attacks are being made every day on Internet servers operated by the DPRK".
Forget the media obsession with that 'million zombies' headline, which seems to have come about after someone posted a statement claiming the attack took the form of a significant SYN flood from a botnet with about a million nodes. To be honest, botnets are out there for hire by people who want to launch such attacks and a million nodes may be on the large side but it's not particularly uncommon these days. What is uncommon, or so you might think, is for a DDoS attack to target something as harmless as Raspberry Pi in the overall scheme of things; a charitable foundation no less. The general perception is that hacktivism rules when it comes to DDoS attacks, and that the victims are mainly big business and political targets. That perception is, sadly, rather unfounded.