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

Hit _ntel too

[Anonymous Coward]

There was a notice on the internal site for _ntel last week about this, but IT was catching it. With the layoffs there, they were a ripe target.

Re:Diabolical

[rubberbando]

Nah, the corporations still prefer the more humiliating way of having security show up at your cube with an exec who hands you a box to put your things in and then marches you out the door in front of everyone. Companies are too paranoid to give you a chance to wreak any havoc. They want you logged out before they let you go. They will isolate you and get you out of the building as soon as possible. Therefore, layoff/firing by email (especially to your company email) is not very probable. I speak from experience. When I was laid off from a job, the execs were swift in getting me out of the door. I wasn't even on the clock yet and they swooped in, gave me my severance check, had me pack up my stuff, took my key, and pushed me out of the door before I knew what had just happened to me.

Re:Diabolical

[arivanov]

This is a US specific phenomenon which does not exist elsewhere. For some reason in the US you are expected to wreak havoc and behave like a sociopathic delinquent. Not that I am surprised considering that some of the most prominent US high tech sector CEOs confess that sociopathy is a definitive job requirement: one example, many others.

That is not the case in the EU. There you will be expected to slave off to the end of your notice period (or at least part of it). The very few to try something sociopathic (the Dixons salary trigger) have seen the end of the very thick legal stick so people tend not to try this any more.