Spam That Delivers a Pink Slip

alphadogg wrote in with a Network World story that begins: "Last week, a handful of employees at Dekalb Medical Center in Decatur, Ga., received e-mails saying they were being laid off. The subject line read 'Urgent — employment issue,' and the sender listed on the message was at dekalb.org, which is the domain the medical center uses. The e-mail contained a link to a Web site that claimed to offer career-counseling information. And so a few employees, concerned about their employment status and no doubt miffed about being laid off via e-mail, clicked on the link to learn more and unwittingly downloaded a keylogger program that was lurking at the site. Score another one for spammers."

Comments

Larry Niven's ARM

[DragonHawk]

No need to train anyone to be paranoid, just take a few mentally ill folks off of their brain meds and leverage their condition.

SF author Larry Niven actually used something very like that idea in his "Known Space" future history. The idea was that society had decided that anyone who was the least bit violent/aggressive was "ill" and gave them meds to make them a happy little camper. Not mindless zombies, just very passive. (That's a difference of degree, of course.) But there was still a need for a police force, to protect against threats both from within and outside human space. So the the police force -- the ARM (Amalgamated Regional Militias) -- were taken off their meds, or even given other meds to make them more paranoid. Only during the work week, of course -- on days off, they took their non-paranoid meds instead.