{"id":547180,"date":"2005-11-02T13:05:57","date_gmt":"2005-11-02T13:05:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost:8888\/wordpress\/technology\/547180-wbs-hoax-email-of-concern-to-iburst-users.html"},"modified":"2005-11-02T13:05:57","modified_gmt":"2005-11-02T13:05:57","slug":"wbs-hoax-email-of-concern-to-iburst-users","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/technology\/547180-wbs-hoax-email-of-concern-to-iburst-users.html","title":{"rendered":"WBS hoax email of concern to iBurst users"},"content":{"rendered":"

The line in the email that got WBS customers really excited was:<\/font>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are excited and happy to announce that effective 1st December 2005, all future and existing iBurst subscribers will have their bandwidth usage cap doubled at no extra cost whatsoever.\u201d<\/font>\n<\/p>\n

Unfortunately the excitement was short-lived as the email was revealed as a hoax.<\/font>\n<\/p>\n

The \u2018hackers\u2019 have stated on the MyADSL forum that their intentions were in no way malicious they simply wanted to reveal the vulnerabilities of the WBS system. <\/font>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cWe would also like to confirm that the individuals who compromised the server did so in order to highlight these vulnerabilities, and did not in anyway shape or form use any information obtained,\u201d reads the message from the hoaxsters.<\/font>\n<\/p>\n

It could however not be confirmed that WBS was in fact hacked but the email sent out was not from WBS. <\/font>\n<\/p>\n

The message posted on the MyADSL forum by the perpetrators continues to explain the security issues surrounding this apparent breach.<\/font>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cThis mail was indeed a hoax. However, we can confirm that this mail was sent directly from our mail servers. It was not spam from an external source. In other words we were compromised, and so was all your information.\u201d <\/font>\n<\/p>\n

WBS is unable to verify the nature of the vulnerability in their system or to even confirm that there is a possible security problem but they did state that it was only their resellers that received the email and not the whole user base.<\/font>\n<\/p>\n

Jackie Hendricks, the media relations officer at WBS said: \u201cWe do acknowledge that there was no truth to the email and we have followed up with resellers regarding the email.\u201d <\/font>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are still investigating the whole incident and we cannot provide any information before our investigations are complete.\u201d<\/font>\n<\/p>\n

Discuss this article<\/a>
\n<\/font>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday iBurst users reported receiving an email informing them that their cap was going to be doubled for free on the MyADSL website.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-547180","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547180"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=547180"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547180\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=547180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=547180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=547180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}