Helpful Spammers?
Friday, 16 September 2005 11:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
daHas this ever happened to you?
Jay, an acquaintance/friend from Ottawa, just emailed me out of the blue. He got an email from "me" with a virus .zip attachment. He sent me a nicely ironic note and we've taken the chance to catch up a bit. I'm glad he did, I've been meaning to get back in touch, like, forever.
The chance of this sort of spam happening is less random than just any two people on the internet; I've gotten a number of similar emails from other perl programmers, who presumably put their name and address in one or more places where it was grabbed by spambots. I find myself wondering whether other communities of a few thousand people have had the same thing happen to them- politicians, activists, newspeople; anybody who is a public member of a group and has to have their email address publicly accessable.
Of course the obvious direction the virus-writers should take this is sending FROM one group to another whose members are more likely to want to open the unsolicited attachment, such as politicians to newspeople, newspeople to activists, activists to... wait, nobody wants to receive unsolicited attachments from activists. (1)
I've yet to receive an email with a snippet of interesting looking perl code as a teaser, with a .zip attachment; which leads me to think the senders don't care a bit about the specific domain of the "sender" or recipient. Whoever figures out that one is gonna catch themselves lots of marks, I'm sure.
(1) Except maybe other activists.
Jay, an acquaintance/friend from Ottawa, just emailed me out of the blue. He got an email from "me" with a virus .zip attachment. He sent me a nicely ironic note and we've taken the chance to catch up a bit. I'm glad he did, I've been meaning to get back in touch, like, forever.
The chance of this sort of spam happening is less random than just any two people on the internet; I've gotten a number of similar emails from other perl programmers, who presumably put their name and address in one or more places where it was grabbed by spambots. I find myself wondering whether other communities of a few thousand people have had the same thing happen to them- politicians, activists, newspeople; anybody who is a public member of a group and has to have their email address publicly accessable.
Of course the obvious direction the virus-writers should take this is sending FROM one group to another whose members are more likely to want to open the unsolicited attachment, such as politicians to newspeople, newspeople to activists, activists to... wait, nobody wants to receive unsolicited attachments from activists. (1)
I've yet to receive an email with a snippet of interesting looking perl code as a teaser, with a .zip attachment; which leads me to think the senders don't care a bit about the specific domain of the "sender" or recipient. Whoever figures out that one is gonna catch themselves lots of marks, I'm sure.
(1) Except maybe other activists.
