According to the Australia's Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), scammers are now targeting scam victims with fake offers to help them recover from scams. The con is to use information from those scammed in the past and approach these people with an offer to recover the funds they have lost for, of course, an up-front fee.
- Scammers sell data on those they've scammed and exploited on places like the Dark Web. They present as a government agency, a lawyer, a consumer advocacy group, a charity or some other normally trusted party. They sell this by asking for a small percentage of the funds recovered. They then get personal information to ostensibly confirm identity and set up a digital wallet for the victim. Others will ask for remote access to computers. The elderly are most commonly targeted because their knowledge of technology is often poor. The best way to deal with any such calls is to hang up. If some agency is cited, give them a call and tell them they are being used to scam people. Scammers like this are of course the lowest of the low and more of them need to be brought to justice.
- If that wasn't enough, there are countries that support groups exploiting vulnerabilities in systems. Once such actor is the group APT40 that has aliases like Gingham Typhoon, Bronze Mohawk and Kryptonite Panda. The group will leverage a new vulnerability and within hours attack those systems that have it, often due to a slow patching process. An advisory from law enforcement agencies in eight nations describes the group as a "state-sponsored cyber group". In this case the state is China and the sponsor is the PRC Ministry of State Security (MSS). Australia led the advisory, having been a victim of the group two years ago when it targeted government agencies, media companies and manufacturers conducting maintenance on wind turbine fleets in the South China Sea. Governments and many organisations are prime targets because they are often slow to apply security patches due to all the testing required before they do so. This provides a window of opportunity for groups like APT40 and countries like China. The DOJ in the US has also been aware of this group for a few years and has successfully prosecuted four of its members.
- A bit over 40 years ago, Microsoft released their text editor Notepad. It has remained since then a very simple editor with few bells and whistles, which is why some use the far superior and free Notepad++. If you have updated to Windows 11 and are running at least the version 11.2405.13, then you will discover, or not, that Notepad now comes with spellcheck and autocorrect. I remember the program Excellence on the Commodore Amiga that came out sometime in the mid-80s that had spellcheck and autocorrect. I also recently had a conversation where I pointed out it took Microsoft until DOS version 5 to include a Move command, so Redmond is not known for its ability to add things at their earliest convenience. Now in Notepad, if autocorrect is not active and a word is misspelled it will have a red line below it. If you right click and select Spelling then the usual list of possible words will appear that you can select from, or opt to add it to your dictionary. At the time of writing there was no global spellcheck option, perhaps available in Windows 13?
- At the time of writing the new Adobe licence states "you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty free sublicensable licence, to use, reproduce, publicly display, distribute, modify, create derivative works based on, publicity perform and translate the Content". This includes anything you generate, edit or touch in any way. It went into effect in February but was not revealed to users directly until June 2024 when they were presented with a no-choice continue button. This is a bit like going into an art store and buying a new easel. From then, anything you paint on that easel belongs in part to the art store. The result was a lot of people immediately cancelled their Adobe subscriptions. Adobe went into crisis management mode and started to back away from their previous actions. The quiet part here is that user content has been, for some time, used to train AI models apparently without their customer base's permission. The user feedback has been so negative over the past month or two that Adobe has gone into defence mode. The US government also recently sued Adobe because it is very difficult to cancel an Adobe subscription, especially if you have a business licence. For the latter there is no button, rather you need to get through to a human and have them do it. Conversely, there are a plethora of ways to sign up for an Adobe account. Note that you can no longer buy Adobe software, only rent it. It may be time to look at alternatives like DaVinci Resolve, Affinity Photo and others that you can still buy outright.
James Hein is an IT professional with over 30 years' standing. You can contact him at jclhein@gmail.com.
