SpamSieve is the best spam filter I’ve ever used in my life, and it’s made my e-mail reading much more efficient and pleasant than it once was.
A few bits of junk sneak through, but it’s probably one every two or three days, instead of several daily offers for luxury Rolex watches at 80% off, or various ways to take advantage of the ATTRACTIVE PRICE on Cializ and Viagre, so she won’t laugh at my noodle every day.
Recently, however, this managed to evade the filters:
mort You computer was infected by our software!
If you will not buy our software – you will bee lost all data on your PC!
It closes with a URL to purchase the software, presumably so the e-mail’s recipient can respond to the comical extortion attempt.
I laughed when I read it. I mean, it’s obviously a load, so I junked it and went on with my day. I kept thinking about it, though: an intelligent person will see right through this and junk it. I’ve already updated my corpus to catch future attempts to convince me I “will bee lost all data” on my PC. But the spammer isn’t looking to ensnare an intelligent person; the spammer is looking to ensnare exactly the kind of person who reads the e-mail, and sees it as a serious threat.
“This was clearly written by an idiot,” the victim would think. Then, after a moment’s consideration: “But what if he’s serious?! I don’t want to bee lost all data on my PC! I’d better do what he says!” Click. Boom.
There are a lot of us who have been online since the Internet was a series of networked BBSes. Some of us remember closed systems like Compuserve and GEnie. We remember what it was like to wait twenty minutes to download a GIF at 28.8, and how magnificent it was to see a weather satellite image on a university’s T1-connected computer.
We see through these scams because we pre-date the scammers, but there are lots of people — and I’m not just talking about our parents and grandparents — who just don’t know any better. They run unpatched machines, leave their routers set to their default passwords, and are prime phishing targets, simply because this technology is, to them, indistinguishable from magic.
As the Internet becomes a more integral part of everyone’s lives, we’re going to encounter more and more people who don’t understand its inner workings any more than I understand how to take apart my car’s diesel engine for fun and profit. I believe that we have a responsibility to these people, to help educate and enlighten them, so they understand how to protect themselves online.
Think of this another way: if we don’t help people understand how to protect themselves from spammers and phishers, how can we expect them to understand the importance of network neutrality?
Discover more from WIL WHEATON dot NET
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
You young kids, with your fancy 14.4 modems. Back in my day, we had 300-baud modems! And we liked it! (Heck, I ran a BBS on a Commodore 64 using a 300-baud modem. Never forget the day I upgraded to the 1200-baud model…)
If we wanted to download porn, we had to fps a binary! Uphill! Both ways! Nowadays, all ya gotta do is click the right link (or the wrong one) and ya get movin’ pictures of folks doin’ the nasty!
Now get offa my lawn, ya darn kids!
That reminds me –
All your bases are belong to us!
tee hee.
I like the ones that look like eBay or PayPal. That really gets my goat going. And yes, there are people that need to be edge-m-acated on this stuff….
I think it’s admirable that you would feel a sense of responsibility to help others who are not as technologically savvy. But the cynic in me says that no matter how much anti-spam software is available, regardless of whether they taught computer security in schools, even if geeks took it upon themselves to offer training, people would still fall for scams. There are still people who hand over their life savings to fortune tellers and televangelists to avoid the physical and spiritual manifestations of “will bee lost all data.” Sad but true.
“simply because this technology is, to them, indistinguishable from magic.”
Har. Let’s all have a good giggle at those hopelessly out-of-date old folk. Speaking as one who is old enough to be your mother, I do indeed realize that the workings of the Internets is no more mystical than those of the TV in my living room–despite the fact that I cannot *explain* the inner workings of either (beyond the obvious: plug it in; turn it on; it works). Nevertheless, I have managed to avoid hazardous e-mail at home because I know enough not to open a message from an address I don’t recognize (having learned that costly lesson on a PC at work); and 2) I learned a *long* time ago that “if a thing is too good to be true, it probably is” (reinforced by the previously mentioned lesson), and c) at home I own and use a Mac. Gods bless Steve Jobs. He’s obviously saving this old coot(ess) from her (laughably ignorant) self.
And don’t even get me started on what actually constitutes “magic.”