From: "Rich Gauszka" 

If most people in the corporate headquarters received the same internal
memo they would be past the thousandth source and the Engadget story would
still have been published.  There are also plenty of gullible people buying
and selling stock for someone to make money off of a planted corporate memo

http://www.newscientisttech.com/channel/tech/electronic-threats/mg19125605.700-
crime-pays-for-stock-spammers.html

PLENTY of gullible people fall prey to stock spammers, according to a
survey of stocks promoted in spam emails.

When Rainer Bohme of Dresden Technical University and Thorsten Holz at the
University of Mannheim, both in Germany, tracked the value of these stocks
last year, they found that, on average, they became twice as popular and
increased in value by about 2 per cent in the days after being advertised
in bulk emails.

The spammers buy stocks at low prices, and promote them in spam emails to
raise the price before selling them off. The trick appears to work.
"If the researchers are right, it means that criminals have a valid
business model," says Bruce Schneier, a security expert based in
Mountain View, California.

"It's interesting that people base financial decisions on non-credible
sources," Bohme says.


"Mark"  wrote in message
news:464d1800$1{at}w3.nls.net...
> Which makes my previous point, even when you "know" the guy
and "trust"
> the guy, you still need to verfiy with 2nd and 3rd sources when whichever
> "guy" goes too far into what you should recognize as
potential "lala land"
> at the outset.
>
> "Rich Gauszka"  wrote in message
> news:464d1026$1{at}w3.nls.net...
>> The problem was that Engadget is a pretty good/reliable  site for
>> information. They were duped as were many Apple employees by an apparent
>> internal Apple email that was relayed to them by a trusted source.
>>
>> http://www.engadget.com/2007/05/17/regarding-yesterdays-apple-news/
>>
>> About an hour and 40 minutes after the initial memo went out, a second
>> memo was sent to the same internal Apple lists, dismissing the first.
>> Soon after, our source -- who we'd been in contact with through the
>> morning --  let us know that Apple was dismissing this earlier email; the
>> second memo passed off the first as "fake" and "not
from Apple". Fake
>> indeed, but it still came from someone familiar with Apple's internal
>> mail systems, lists, memo composition structure, etc., who found a way to
>> plant a phony memo in the inboxes of who knows how many Apple employees.
>> (Both emails are published in the original post.) Why Apple took nearly
>> two hours to respond to the situation we do not know.
>>
>> The person or persons behind the phony email had apparently put one over
>> on Apple employees to the extent that those employees who received that
>> memo and passed it along to us and others took it as truth -- as did we.
>> Although we made sure to confirm and reconfirm with our source that this
>> email was legit at the time it was sent out, unfortunately no amount of
>> vetting and confirming sources can account for what happens when a
>> corporate memo turns out to be fraudulently produced and distributed in
>> this way.
>>
>> So who sent the memo, and why? We don't know, and we're not sure we ever
>> will. Again, it was not a public memo, and it was not distributed outside
>> Apple's internal Bullet News list to employees. Ultimately we did the
>> only thing we felt right in doing after the initial post: leave it up
>> unedited (but struck through), making sure the developing situation was
>> made as lucid as possible for anyone involved in order to minimize the
>> damages the leaked email caused.
>>
>> Credibility and trust is the currency of our realm, and it's clear we
>> lost some of that. (And to be 100% clear, no one at Engadget is allowed
>> to own stock in any of the companies we write about.) We take what we do
>> very seriously and would never knowingly pass along information that we
>> believed could be false or inaccurate; in this case, as stated above, we
>> had confirmation from within Apple that this was in fact information that
>> been distributed via Apple's internal corporate email system. If we had
>> had any inkling that ANYONE could have exploited that system that would
>> have greatly affected how we proceeded.
>>
>>
>> "Mark"  wrote in message
>> news:464d0cb6$1{at}w3.nls.net...
>>> "Within minutes, some people who read the post were selling their
>>> Apple stock,"
>>>
>>> Fools.
>>>
>>> It has nothing to do with "bloggers" vs.
"legitimate" reporting, it goes
>>> to common sense and 2nd sourcing everything -- blogs are more often a
>>> 2nd source for what the real story is, but it can work in reverse just
>>> as well (and that direction will become more commonplace if the MSM
>>> wants to survive).
>>>
>>> Bloggers are like the pamphleteers of yore, you have to follow them and
>>> evaluate them on an individual basis -- sure there's going to be
>>> erroneous material from many (even most if you will) but once you have a
>>> feel for a particular guy's point of view you can easily parse what
>>> makes sense and what doesn't >> subjects triple check even those you trust before you buy in>
>>>
>>>
>>> "Rich Gauszka" 
wrote in message
>>> news:464ce95f$1{at}w3.nls.net...
>>>>
>>>> blogger power?
>>>>
>>>>
http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2007/05/did_anyone_else.
html
>>>>
>>>> It's stories like this that make bloggers cringe.
Yesterday, tech blog
>>>> Engadget received supposed insider information about a delay of the
>>>> iPhone until October, and another delay for Leopard,
pushing the new OS
>>>> to January of 2008. Duty bound to report to its readers, it filed a
>>>> post. Within minutes, some people who read the post were
selling their
>>>> Apple stock, which dipped 3% in mid-day trading yesterday.
The origin
>>>> of the information was an internal Apple memo...which
turned out to be
>>>> fake. Fake or not, Apple's market capitalization sunk by $4 billion
>>>> once the memo became public.
>>>>
>>>> Some are crying for an SEC investigation. According to a
Business 2.0
>>>> blog, one shareholder sold 5 million shares within 10 to
15 minutes of
>>>> seeing the post. The post was based on this language seen
in the fake
>>>> memo:
>>>>
>>>>     Apple issued a press release today announcing that
iPhone which was
>>>> scheduled to ship in June, has been moved to October and the release
>>>> date for Mac OS X Leopard has been moved to January next year.
>>>>
>>>> Apparently the email came from what Engadget calls a
"trusted source"
>>>> and was delivered from within Apple's internal email
system, giving it
>>>> the air of authenticity. Apple discovered the fake email
quickly and 90
>>>> minutes later sent out a real email explaining that the
first one was a
>>>> fake:
>>>>
>>>>     "This communication is fake and did not come from
Apple. Apple is
>>>> on track to ship iPhone in late June and Mac OS X Leopard
in October,"
>>>> said Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris.
>>>>
>>>> Too late. The damage had already been done. Luckily, the turmoil was
>>>> brief. The stock recovered most of its value by the end of
the day (it
>>>> closed down 0.17%). There are still a lot of questions that remain
>>>> unanswered. Who really sent the memo? How did they do it from within
>>>> the Apple system? Did they hack in? We can only assume that Apple is
>>>> hunting down the responsible party and will take appropriate action
>>>> once that person is found.
>>>>
>>>> As a blogger, it's often hard to separate the wheat from
the chaff in
>>>> the online world, especially when "scooping" the
competition is top of
>>>> mind. From Engadget's point of view, I can understand why they would
>>>> put up their original post based on the supposed good quality source
>>>> material. What are bloggers to do, however, when fed erroneous
>>>> information that looks real? Their gut instinct is to post first,
>>>> question later. Lessons learned in Journalism 101,
however, would have
>>>> prevented the debacle. It never hurts to pick up the phone
and call a
>>>> company rep to confirm the validity of the information.
Will this delay
>>>> the story? Sure. But in the end, accuracy is more
important than being
>>>> the first to report a story.
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>
>

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-5