Monday, June 6, 2011

From the sublime to the ridiculous

I know, just yesterday a vision of the Ascension of Christ. Today a kvetch on spam.

I've been noticing for about three months now the latest attempt to get us to open dangerous attachments under the guise of the benign.

I routinely receive notices that say they are from UPS, or DHL, or FedEx, with an attachment. The first one, months ago, was from FedEx. My husband gets occasional deliveries through them so I opened the email. It instructed me to open the attachment to get the details of a delivery. I called mi esposo - the carriers had never used attachments before. He said he was not expecting anything, so I deleted the file.

Now I receive these things daily - yesterday all three of them in one day! and another this morning. These are not from the actual carriers. They are spam. Sometimes I'd love to find out what's behind that closed door, the attachment. But I know better.

I wonder if there's something theological in this? No, there's just badly behaved people doing badly behaved things in order to create chaos and disaster in the lives of other people they don't even know, and this latest attempt is hiding behind actual legitimate businesses so there's a high chance people are getting spam blowing up in their faces. Enough.

2 comments:

DeanB said...

An antivirus company in Finland, F-secure, has a blog http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/
that talks about new threats in spam as they are found. It's scary (of course they want you to be scared enough to buy their product) but informative.

Many people have computers set so that if a zip file contains a program, that program will be run as soon as you open the zip file. Those spammed zip files normally contain a malware program that will put your program on a botnet so spammers will use your computer to send spam, or else a keylogger that will steal your credit card number if you buy something online, or your bank account password, etc. There's no excuse for FedEx or DHL or UPS to send you a zip file even if you're expecting a delivery. Delete them immediately!

Lois Keen said...

Thanks, DeanB - I do delete them as soon as I see them. They're getting more frequent. Seriously, everyone out there, DeanB is right - delete delete delete!!