$100 FOR $1,000 AT KAPITALL: Via My Money Blog, Kapitall Brokerage has a decent promotion going on right now. If you’re a new customer and open an account by March 31 the following payouts are in effect:
- Deposit $50, get $50 + 500 Kapitall Koins.
- Deposit $1,000, get $100 and 1,000 Kapitall Koins.
- Deposit $10,000, get $200 and 2,000 Kapitall Koins.
Kapitall Koins are some sort of krazy rewards kurrency. You can get free trades with 2,000 of them. Note that you will have to do at least one trade to get the bonus.
BOGUS LEGAL THREAT NEWS: We’re not the only bloggers dealing with frivolous legal threats. Mr. Money Moustache is apparently being threatened because somebody didn’t like something that somebody wrote on his forum. MMM, to his credit, is standing his ground and fighting back.
The company suing is called Kiss Trust, and its causus belli is a commenter who said, “This scam product has been discussed here before. Stay away. It’s a marketing ploy.”
Tech Dirt has a nice rundown of the whole mess, concluding:
Even if the comment proves to be defaming, what does Kiss Trust get in return? A company is free to defend its reputation, but it should, at the very least, consider whether the potential reputation damage will outweigh what it’s trying to remove. Well, actually, at the very least, it should understand the laws it’s attempting to use so that its efforts aren’t wasted pursuing the wrong target.
Which is a polite way of saying that the management of the Eastern Point Trust Company, which owns Kiss Trust, is quite stupid. Hopefully they won’t be dumb enough to sue Saverocity for my having pointing that out. If they’re reading this, they might want to know that suing somebody for using the word “scam” in connection with Kiss Trust is a great way to link the word “scam” to Kiss Trust in Google search results.
HOW TARGET TOTALLY BLEW IT: People who aren’t familiar with how large organizations work tend to overestimate their competence. Check out BusinessWeek’s cover story about how the Target data breach was completely avoidable:
On Nov. 30, according to a person who has consulted on Target’s investigation but is not authorized to speak on the record, the hackers deployed their custom-made code, triggering a FireEye alert that indicated unfamiliar malware: “malware.binary.” Details soon followed, including addresses for the servers where the hackers wanted their stolen data to be sent. As the hackers inserted more versions of the same malware (they may have used as many as five, security researchers say), the security system sent out more alerts, each the most urgent on FireEye’s graded scale, says the person who has consulted on Target’s probe.
The breach could have been stopped there without human intervention. The system has an option to automatically delete malware as it’s detected. But according to two people who audited FireEye’s performance after the breach, Target’s security team turned that function off. Edward Kiledjian, chief information security officer for Bombardier Aerospace, an aircraft maker that has used FireEye for more than a year, says that’s not unusual. “Typically, as a security team, you want to have that last decision point of ‘what do I do,’ ” he says. But, he warns, that puts pressure on a team to quickly find and neutralize the infected computers.
Target had done a months-long test of FireEye that ended in May and was rolling out the technology throughout the company’s massive IT system. It’s possible that FireEye was still viewed with some skepticism by its minders at the time of the hack, say two people familiar with Target’s security operations. And the SOC manager, Brian Bobo, departed the company in October, according to his LinkedIn page, leaving a crucial post vacant. (Bobo declined to comment.) Yet it was clear Target was getting warnings of a serious compromise. Even the company’s antivirus system, Symantec Endpoint Protection, identified suspicious behavior over several days around Thanksgiving—pointing to the same server identified by the FireEye alerts. “The malware utilized is absolutely unsophisticated and uninteresting,” says Jim Walter, director of threat intelligence operations at security technology company McAfee. If Target had had a firm grasp on its network security environment, he adds, “they absolutely would have observed this behavior occurring on its network.”
Full article here.
REAL ESTATE: Looking for a beach house this summer? The Outer Banks are worth a visit if you’ve never been there! This five-bedroom house, for example, is called “The Wave Breaker”:
Here’s the description:
If you’re ready for a break from the ordinary, Wavebreaker is just the vacation home for you! This extraordinary gem is as oceanfront as they come with the added bonus of sound views from both levels. Located in Mirlo Beach subdivision at the very end of Rodanthe, this magnificent home boasts unobstructed ocean views for watching the sunrise above the horizon. Step onto the oceanfront deck and take in the smell of the fresh ocean breeze and the sound of the crashing waves.
Oh, and here’s a picture from the Charlotte Observer that was taken last week:
“As oceanfront as they come”, indeed!
A giant over water bungalow!
It’s pretty much the same thing as the Maldives.
…with a better chance of becoming an underwater bungalow?