Edison Chan Sex Scandal. Lesson to be learned!

Last week, the hottest news was seems to be Edison Chan Sex Scandal. TV news, newspapers and various magazines were reporting on it. Colleagues in the office and people in the coffee shop were also talking about it.

For the benefit of those who do not know about this news, photographs of Edison Chan(famous Hong Kong actor) in bed with several top female actresses and singers were circulated in the Internet. According to reports, those photographs were illegally copied from Edison's laptop while it was being serviced. Rumours that the culprit had attempt to blackmail Edison's management company but failed.

I decided to highlight this scandal because i think that there are afew lessons that people can learned from it. As mention previously in my blog ("Mobile Warrior - Part 1, Disk Encryption" by AhTan), everyone should encrypt their important data in their computers. Beside sexy pictures, sensitive documents (such as company proposal, financial data) and personal information (such as Bank accounts number) should be properly encrypted.

Beside properly encrypting your important data, those data should also be properly backup (previous acticle "Mobile Warrior- Part 2: Backup, Backup"). With important data properly encrypted and backup, you will not have much worries that your data be stolen or lost when sending your laptop for servicing.

There were also reports that several spoofed and virus emails, claiming to contain Edison's sex photo, were found "tricking" curious users to download malware. Those emails contains links to "Edison's Sex pictures", which actually lead to websites containing malwares. Those "malicious" links were also found in online forums discussing on Edison's scandal.

Curiosity killed the cat, this is not the first time "hackers" are using "famous" topics (e.g Paris Hilton Sex video, Asian Tsunami video) to trick users to download malware. So be careful when trying to download files from untrusted source.

Related Reports:
- Sex scandal rocks Hong Kong
- AusCERT National Alerts - Tsunami Warning Fraudulent E-mails and Malicious Web Sites