Morning Bulletin: Russia hits White House, Yahoo hack & banks use social media in lieu of credit checks
The Friday feeling is sorely absent from today’s headlines, with Yahoo chief Marissa Meyer nursing a major headache from possibly the worst hack of all time. She’s not the only person to be caught off guard however with even the White House apparently falling victim to cyber criminals. Elsewhere we pick up on moves by the banking sector to harness social media posts as an alternative means of checking credit histories.
Banks are developing means to scan customers' social media posts such as Facebook to build up a picture of their financial health where no credit history is available, reports Business Insider. The unorthodox measure has been necessitated by the need to create a more accurate portrait of millennials' wealth.
Yahoo has owned up to the full scale of a massive hack dating from 2014 for the first time, revealing that some 500m user accounts were affected by the breach in which names, email addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth and encrypted passwords of individuals were obtained.
Publishers are clamouring for government assistance to help create a level playing field in the industry, amidst concern that internet giants such as Google and Facebook wield too much power in aggregating and repackaging news for their mammoth audiences.
Hackers who targeted the White House, publishing detailed travel arrangements for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, as well as Michelle Obama’s passport, have been linked to Russian intelligence according to reports in The Times. All the documents apparently originate from the personal Gmail account of a staff member.
Campaign kicks off Friday morning with an investigation into the guerrilla ‘Priced out of London’ campaign by Sunshine creative agency, which has seen unassuming price stickers in a London Tesco store supplanted with eye watering prices – an off the wall way of illustrating spiralling house price inflation in the capital.
Google has led a giant cash transfusion to Airbnb, which has raised $555m from its latest funding round, valuing the service at a whopping $30bn. Whilst the tie-up is purely financial, Google will now seek to broker stronger links between the two firms.
Adweek leads with good news for virtual reality backers following a report by Nielsen which indicates that the technology might be of interest to mainstream consumers, not just hardcore gamers and technology nerds.
Sports Direct owner Mike Ashley has resumed day to day control of his sprawling retail empire with ‘immediate effect’ following the resignation of chief executive Dave Dorsey. The change at the top follows a torrid few weeks of headlines for the billionaire retail tycoon over poor working conditions.
Former BBC Scotland controller Ken MacQuarrie has been elevated to the post of nations and regions director, a position which will give him authority to oversee output across all the nations and regions of the UK.
The Subaru brand has become the latest to be embroiled in a product recall after parent Fuji Heavy was forced to call back 935,000 vehicles over faulty front windshield wipers, according to Reuters.