A new brand of computer crime is sweeping the nation, could you become a victim? We bring you this exclusive report so you can know the facts.
Picture a summer's day, you leave your computer downloading a selection of legally purchased music or movies to enjoy later and go outside for some fresh air. Unknown to you, a member of a fast growing underground group of hackers has set his sights on your property. This time it isn't your credit card numbers or logs of your browsing and chatting history, this criminal is after something bigger - your fruit. That's right, recently an exploit was discovered that allows anyone with the right skills and tools to remotely log into your computer and steal any nearby fruit right from the bowl it is sitting in. Since the initial discovery of this exploit, originally found to exist in all Windows versions but shortly after also discovered in the Linux kernel, fruit thefts have risen exponentially. Each day new tools are becoming available to make the process ever easier to perform.
We spoke to one victim, Mr Joe Samson (28) from Reading, and found it had caused him great inconvenience. "I went out for a cigarette," he told us, "and when I got back all my pears were gone. I had to go to the local shop to stock back up again." He went on to describe the counter-measures he has taken against this happening again: "Now I keep my fruit bowl on the other side of the room, and I only leave my PC on when I absolutely have to."
Linksys, a division of Cisco producing domestic routers, recently released a statement saying that they are looking into providing anti-fruit theft built into the products. Firewall providers are reported to also be looking into methods of combating the problem.
Dr Taki of the Virtual Fruit Theft Research Group at Cambridge University, recently formed to assist the industry in this area, told us that "these hackers in the majority case don't seem to be launching these attacks towards a goal of simple possession of the fruit, instead it seems to be a question of status. The higher profile the target and the larger the fruit taken the more they appear to be respected by their peers." He then went on to say that "there does appear to be a rising number of people outside of that community who are interested only in the theft aspect and who are using prebuilt tools to automate the process. These people are especially dangerous as they do not have any code or system of ethics of the form that those mentioned earlier do."
Our advice to our readers is not to leave any fruit near to a computer unattended and to switch off your computer when you are not using it. We will bring you more news as it breaks.
Disclaimer: Obviously this isn't real news. I'm not a news blog and the story is frankly ridiculous. Anyone who actually needs this disclaimer here shouldn't really be using the internet unsupervised (though I do have some programs I can sell you that will speed up your connection 600% as well as protect you from psychic mind control rays).
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