School Kids Brought Google to Its Knees

Computer security experts and the National Security Agency have been hard at work, trying to figure out where in China recent attacks on Google originated.

It turns out that Google did not suffer at the hands of the Chinese government, but, wait for it, school kids.

Tracing the attacks further back, to an elite Chinese university and a vocational school, is a breakthrough in a difficult task. Evidence acquired by a United States military contractor that faced the same attacks as Google has even led investigators to suspect a link to a specific computer science class, taught by a Ukrainian professor at the vocational school.

Did you get that? A computer science class is responsible for attacking one of the most sophisticated technology companies in the world. School kids!

But, to be fair, these aren’t just any old school kids. No! These are bored school kids…

…done by one or two geek students in the school who are just keen on experimenting with their hacking skills learned from the school, since the sources in the school and network are so limited.

Seriously? When I was in a computer science class, I was taught how to get my computer to ask me if I was having a good day or not! These guys are hacking into Google for yucks!

Of course, this could all be just a decoy. The hackers may have hijacked the schools’ IP addresses to throw the NSA off the scent. A Mr. Shao, former dean at one of the schools, insists “it’s impossible for our students to hack Google or other U.S. companies because they are just high school graduates and not at an advanced level.”

So there you have it. Young kids just don’t have the skills for this sophisticated level of hacking. Which leads me to my final question:

Would you like to play a game?

Is This Recession Over Yet?

We appear to be caught in a rut as of late. No one wants to make a definitive statement as to whether or not the recession / slow down / depression / aberration or whatever we call this thing is over or not. Depending on who you talk to we can either be on the edge of a recovery or the edge of a cliff. Is there a way to tell if this dark economic time is seeing some light at the end of the tunnel?

We at Marketing Pilgrim are not analysts and we don’t claim to be. What we can do, however, is tell you about reports that are out there that can provide some insight or at least help us think differently. As marketers we tend to land on the hopeful / optimistic side of news because we want people to buy our stuff, right? Well, if the folks at Millward Brown Optimor which is owned by WPP are right with their BrandZ Portfolio study then there may be indications that at least the strongest of the strong, brandwise, are showing signs of life.

The analysis shows the top 100 brands, which Millward Brown refers to as the BrandZ Portfolio and includes many technology companies like Apple, Vodafone, Microsoft, Nokia, BlackBerry, Intel and others, are recovering from the recession at a faster pace than the market. As the chart above shows, the most valuable global brands have been outperforming the S&P 500 for a number of years now but show a much faster recovery from the recession than the market in recent months.

As noted by Robin Wauters of TechCrunch it’s a relief of sorts to at least see both of the performance indicators showing movement in the positive direction.

So why would big brands show a quicker recovery than the S&P as a whole? Well, who really knows? While this data is interesting it may be a stretch to make this kind of comparison since the ranking of the Top Brands is something that needed to be ‘crafted’. Here is some of the criteria.

The ranking is calculated using a methodology called “Economic Use”, taking into account the role that brands play in purchase decisions and identifying what proportion of the business value can be attributed purely to the brand. Besides inputs from the BrandZ study, the ranking uses financial data from Bloomberg and market and product data from Datamonitor. The ranking takes into account regional variations since even for truly global brands measures of brand contribution might differ substantially across countries.

So we need your thoughts again Pilgrims. Putting aside a larger worldview for a minute what is happening in your neck of the woods? Are you seeing signs of recovery or signs of ‘more of the same’? While it’s interesting to look at studies like this what is really happening at the street level. I see some more activity but I think the activity is more around preparing to spend more at some point in the future rather than getting back into the game right now. What about you?