Scam, Scam, Scam

One of the things that never ceases to amaze me about phishers is how incredibly creative they can be in writing text that encourages recipients to open their emails.
There have been two separate incident recently that inspired me to talk about phishing.
The first was watching viruses propagate through my local neighborhood mailing list. I live in Silicon Valley and we do have an email list for neighbors to talk, plan and generally share information. Last week one of the neighbors got infected with a virus, and their address started posting links to more viruses to the list. Over the weekend I watched half a dozen neighbors get infected and post more viruses to the list.
The second is the dozens of messages I’ve been receiving telling me there are naked photos of me on the Internet. They have a couple different forms. Some pretend to be concerned friends worried that my private photos have leaked. Others threaten legal action or that the police are investigating me. Still others tell me I’ve ruined a friendship by sharing these photos.
None of those things are true, of course. They’re all trying to get me to open a file and infect my machine with some virus or another.

Last week I said that botnets were mostly a solved problem. I then spent a paragraph trying to explain I didn’t mean they were gone, but that we had a handle on them. What I really should have said is that botnets are a mostly mitigated problem and that mitigation doesn’t need manual intervention.
But that doesn’t mean they’re not still a problem. Or that infections are a thing of the past. They’re certainly not.