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You can think of a hacker as an evil genius who wants to endanger the world, but the truth is that the reality is very different. In many cases they are small frauds to earn money, like the one we know today, which consists of selling previous appointments for the employment office, after hacking their website
This curious case has been discovered by the Junta de Andalucía in El Ejido, in the province of Almería. Apparently, the telephone booths in the area have created a system that reserves all previous appointments for the Andalusian Employment Service as soon as they are available, leaving citizens out. These appointments are then sold for 3 euros to those interested.
Accessing the employment office is free, but these cybercriminals take advantage of a vulnerability on the official website In addition, due to the agricultural campaign, at this time many residents of El Ejido must approach to seal their employment benefit.
Of course, the authorities advise against purchasing appointments that are sold, since doing so would serve to encourage fraud.
In search of solutions to hacking
The Andalusian Employment Service is looking for solutions to the hacking of its website, including adding a Captcha, an image that the user must convert into text to make the request, and that prevents it from being carried out by automatic systems. It also identifies the Internet addresses of call shops involved in the fraud, to block their access to the web.
So even the public employment service is endangered by hackers. Let's hope that the fraud of prior appointments for the employment office stops and, above all, that it does not spread to other Spanish towns. Of course, this is clear proof of how technologies affect us on a day-to-day basis.
What do you think of this topic? Have you come across scams like these before, or would you never have expected them to spill over into a topic as sensitive as unemployment insurance?
