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."

Comments

A little ironic...

[ChrisF79]

Isn't it ironic that to trick a user into clicking a fake email, they use the fakest of all celebrities?

Link, please?

[cuzality]

Please post a link where we can read these emails.

No big surprise

[moz25]

Well, if I have to choose between "see Britney Spears naked" and "see Bill Gates" naked, I'll pick the first worm any day!

Virus Drills

[bigtallmofo]

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.

Re:Virus Drills

[xMilkmanDanx]

Nope, pretty soon they don't check their email at all and productivity skyrockets!

Re:More intelligent software or users?

[jalefkowit]

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!

... 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.

You're talking about educating human nature out of people. Good luck with that.

The lesson of stories like this one are not that we need to somehow engineer smarter users -- it's that modern information systems are not designed around users to begin with. They're designed around lists of features and ship-by dates.

A system should behave in a way that one would expect it to. Certain operations -- deleting things, say -- are obviously risky, and I've never met any user who didn't get that. But who would expect opening an e-mail to be a risky proposition? The fact that it undeniably is (in some environments) doesn't mean that people are stupid for not knowing which e-mails to leave closed, it means that e-mail is broken for many millions of users. The fact that e-mail as a medium can be exploited like that is a weakness of the medium, not the user.

You can lament human nature all you want, but it is what it is. A well-designed system should be able to deal with that. Having to train users to do alien things should be taken as a sign that your system may not be so well-designed, not as a sign that we need to get cracking on Human Being 2.0.