“Noxious Nigel” turns out to be a social engineering hack – or is it?

May 19, 2008  |  Uncategorized  |  Share  | 

Last week I posted about Noxious Nigel - a mystery blogger exposing scandals within the South African IT industry.

Well, go to the ‘Noxious Nigel’ website today and all the previous stories and offers to pay for dirt have been removed, and replaced with a post that claims the whole thing was a social engineering hack to get access to local multinationals’ computing environments. Apparently by getting them to run a file… don’t remember seeing anything like that in the original site.

The top banner, that suggested that ‘Noxious Nigel’ was really a certain Tony B has also been removed.

What I think really happened is that ‘Noxious Nigel’ got some serious traffic after the commotion of last week, followed by wet feet (and possibly a skrik at the fact that some people had figured out who he was) and a retraction of the Digital Planet / HP story. If not, then some system administrators have got their work cut out for them today! Either way, Noxious Nigel makes headlines in the blogosphere, again.

EDIT: Today the site is home to ‘Merriweather, Ives and Taylor’ – a corporate risk company. This gets more ridiculous by the second. I still have a grab of the original Digital Planet / HP story though, and I will put this up on my site later – it smacks of personal vendetta. And if a corporate risk company thinks that personally attacking and insulting people is a good way to build business then I honestly hope they sink in the market. Pathetic.

 
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  • Craig

    It is a “social experiment” and a marketing con. very brave indeed but being conned tends to make people angry, even people who weren’t affected by his posts. Maybe someone will fake a bomb scare at his talk as a “social experiment”. Social engineers love their trade until it’s turned back on them.

  • SuperMario

    I read somewhere that the “Nigel Merriweather” group is the new form of Nigerian scam. Their aim seems to be to try take money upfront for a “book tour”.
    They will vanish with the money if anyone falls for it and there will be no “tour”.

    They hide behind American privacy laws but mostly use untraceable internet cafes to set up the sting. They probably published some vendetta stuff sent to them anonymously (they offered to pay for scandal) to stimulate traffic for their book “tour”.

    My guess is loads of angry people will fall for it.

  • http://www.andyhadfield.com Andy Hadfield

    No google results, page 1 or 2 for Nigel Merriweather. I would be extremely interested if this was a confidence scam. That’s a LOT of effort for a couple of delegate fees.