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Britney is #1 Virus Celebrity
No France writes "The two ways for an email virus to spread is to use an exploit, or entice the user to click the link/executable. Of course the latter is the easiest, and is the most effective when used in conjunction with a celebrity's name.
Despite the recent Jackson suicide emails, Britney Spears is the one to recently edge out Bill Gates as the top virus celebrity. The top 10 (in descending order): Britney Spears, Bill Gates, Jennifer Lopez, Shakira, Osama Bin Laden, Michael Jackson, Bill Clinton, Anna Kournikova, Paris Hilton, and Pamela Anderson."
'nuff said.
Isn't it ironic that to trick a user into clicking a fake email, they use the fakest of all celebrities?
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Please post a link where we can read these emails.
I don't understand how anyone can get e-mail viruses easily. i never get any e-mail viruses, but when I do, it's either too obvious and I delete them. how do you guys get e-mail viruses then?
Well, if I have to choose between "see Britney Spears naked" and "see Bill Gates" naked, I'll pick the first worm any day!
see a Text Widget
These kinds of stories, while making the majority among us cringe at the stupidity of the user that falls for this, underlies an important point.
THIS IS WHAT YOUR IT DEPARTMENT HAS TO DEAL WITH!
Millions of man hours and hundreds of millions of dollars go down the tubes to user ignorance. As these costs spiral, the IT sector diminishes. At some point, we will have to stop the patchwork of protecting the users from themselves and engage in the proactive education from these people so they don't hurt themselves and cost their companies, ISPs, and our economy in lost man hours and dollars. How to do this merits exploration, as for every new procedure we establish to protect the user, the user seems to find a way to break it somehow.
The Crimson Dragon
Hot_britney_sex_video.exe for free?? And all I have to do is click yes? Awesome!
Is, of course, ourselves. My experience with phishing and other social-hacks-by-email suggest that the ones that seem to really trip people up are the ones that recipients think are about themselves. I have seen the enemy and he is us.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I've said this many times before, but my idea is to stage virus drills. Every week or so, the IT department should send fake viruses to a random population of the corporate environment. It will have an attachment that will only report to the IT department who opened it. Once a user opens the fake virus attachment, they must watch a 2-hour video on their own time on the subject of "safe email habits".
Pretty soon, they'll be too paranoid to open any attachment.
I'm a big tall mofo.
http://halley.cc/ed/linux/newcomer/filename.html includes a simple graphic to accompany the text.
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Simple People.
http://www.google.com/jobs/britney.html
You come in at number 2. Well done.
Why this obsession with Britney (or other celebs) - if she was just someone you knew and you saw here naked you'd look away.
http://jcsnippets.atspace.com/ - a collection of Java & C# snippets
As far as what it is with Brittney, repeat after me: "Lowest Common Denominator." "White Trash Schadenfreude." There's some fascination with the squalid quality there -- poverty of spirit despite all the money and fame. She's like a punctured silicone implant lying on the hood of a rusty pimped Civic. And I do mean "pimped."
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
There's some sense of satisfaction I get in knowing that every time a person ogles, clicks, downloads or otherwise interfaces with that pizza-faced mess known as Brittany Spears, there's a good chance their computer will catch the clap.
:::: the insomniac's digest
"entice the user to click the link/executable. Of course the latter is the easiest, and is the most effective when used in conjunction with a celebrity's name. "
Proving once again that the number one security problem is not Windows, or flaws in Windows -- it is user stupidity.
Osama bin Laden is a celebrity? ...I guess he is on Al Jazeera
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
in that I recognize every one of those individuals. I can even put a face to most of them !
What gamut of innate garbage must my brain contain beyond that...
I'm disgusted by the cesspool that is my mind and, for once, very conscious of the torrents of crap being sluised into it every moment.
And here I am reading slashdot.
Agent: "Cheif, we interceped another email from Osama Bin Laden"
Chief: "We got him this time. Open it asap"
Agent: "I don't understand, all it did was change my home page to xxxarabia.com"
Chief: "Damn you Bin Laden!"
Sneakiest one I ever saw tried to infect my computer by searching through the currently infected computer's sent messages in outlook express looking for ones with attachments. It took the subject line of the original, changed it to "Re: [original subject line]", and set the body of the message to be something along the lines of:
I hope you didn't open that last attachment I sent you. Turns out it was actually infected with a virus. I've attached a cleanup tool that ought to remove the virus for you. I'm really sorry about that!
Fortunately for me, the last attachment he had sent was a jpeg. So I let him know he was infected with a rather clever virus...
But I rather imagine that that virus didn't spread well for all its cleverness. Relying on the contents of someone's sent folder has got to drastically reduce the number of people for the virus to spread to.
I applaud your creativity, but that's bad training.
Generally speaking, positive reinforcement (reward for good behavior) works better than punishment for bad behavior. Punishing bad behavior may get results, but it also reduces overall performance for both the individual and the group, by engendering fear of failure.
Negative reinforcement (rewarding good behavior by removing punishment) can work well in the right circumstances. The punishment should have been already earned and deserved, and both the good and bad behavior should be related somehow to the punishment.
Users are demanding the ability to use their email as a file copying and storage mechanism. We as sysadmins can point out that we have a much more efficient means of doing that - this file server over here - but they don't seem to like that. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him think.
If you really want to do some training:
Done in a spirit of cooperation, rather than confrontation, you should see an immediate sharp reduction in the number of viruses that people open.
sigs, as if you care.
The limit of two terms for a US President goes all the way back to George Washington. A lot of our founding ideas were a reaction to what we perceived as the fundamental unfairness of the monarchy, so we took steps to rigidly limit the power of our executive. An 8-year maximum term was one of those steps.
FDR broke it by serving part of a thrid term before his death, and there were a lot of people who wanted to get a third term out of Reagan... but traditionally, it's not an option.
Even if we've got a "really great president" (which seems increasingly unlikely these days, given the candidates put up by both major parties over the last 20 years), it's two terms and out, and, generally speaking, we like it that way.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
It WAS a tradition, but with the 22nd Amendment it became immutable law. Two terms is the limit.
Amendment XXII
Section 1. No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once. But this article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President when this article was proposed by the Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Yes, they did. Back in "the day" viruses were often written in hand-coded assembly. That was craftsmanship, that was /misty eyes. Seriously, visual basic is used mainly for two reasons. Firstly, most virus writers are fairly immature (except those trying to get botnets for money) and visual basic is often the first language they learn. Secondly, visual basic scripts include their source, thus if you want to base your virus on an existing one, it's a lot easier to do with a visual basic one than decompiling a virus and trying to make sense of it. Any other dynamic language would work for this, but windows ships with visual basic interpreter wheras it doesn't include one for perl, python etc. (and dos scripting is too useless)
I am trolling
Britney? Whew! That's a Windows virus! Now, if it had been Natalie Portman (petrified and naked) I would have been worried.