Sophos Cloud Optix
There’s so much unreconstructed spam these days – old-school spam which doesn’t make the slightest attempt to disguise its outrageous bogosity – that it takes something really special to catch one’s attention.
Finding amusing examples is a little like searching for a stalk of hay in a haystack.
But Naked Security readers are nothing if not perspicacious, and one of our readers, who may or may not be called Michael, told us about a spam he’d received which really does warrant attention.
“We are writing,” it starts off redundantly, “to know if you are DEAD.”
Actually, it doesn’t say writing. It says writhing, which is either a spelling mistake or a Twainesque figure of speech to express just how keen the writers really are. One imagines them squirming on the edges of their seats, waiting for your reply.
The writers have an interesting approach to life after death. They clearly entertain the likelihood of internet access in the afterlife, but of a read-only sort. In other words, they accept that if you are dead, you’ll probably get the email, but won’t be able to reply. “If it happened we did not hear from you after 7 days,” they say comfortingly, “MAY YOUR SOUL REST IN PERFECT PEACE.”
(This raises some interesting technotheological questions. If there is an earth-to-heaven TCP router, what do the firewall rules look like?)
Of course, despite the wackiness of this spam, some recipients may be tempted to reply. Some will consider this sort of thing worthy of spambaiting: deliberately writing back to the scammers with something witty, outrageous, insulting or timewasting.
Others may be frightened into replying “just in case” – not giving any personal details, but simply so they have something on record to show that they responded. After all, the spam implies that someone else – Mr Fricklin, in this case – is trying to initiate a scam involving you.
Please don’t respond for either reason. Scammers and fraudsters of this sort have your worst interests at heart. Their business depends on replies. So don’t give them any. Not seriously, and not in jest.
Any sort of reply gives them the will to continue. Silence, in a spammer’s inbox, is our most golden result.
I'd be the one to spambait from a safe email address and say "Yes, I is dead. Email in heaven is very bad. Tried to tell God to update lines to gold wire….doesn't want to waste on anything less than making the golden brick road longer…"
Wire? Surely some sort of fibre – the stuff they make harp strings out of, perhaps?
Seriously, we need to discourage people from spambaiting.
Especially those people who force the spammers to do demeaning things like putting fish down their bum crack, or to expend time and energy carving wooden versions of Commodore 64s, and to publish photos of the result. That's supposed to teach the spammers a jolly good lesson.
You don't imagine that the guys making real money out of scamming do those tasks themselves, do you? They outsource them to their minions – some of whom may be in little or no position to refuse.
See April 12th Dilbert cartoon "our new product will be a social network for people who want to be friends with ghosts". (The stroy sequence started April 11th).
Coincidental
Brilliant, especially: "This raises some interesting technotheological questions. If there is an earth-to-heaven TCP router, what do the firewall rules look like?" Great stuff 🙂
"Scammers and fraudsters of this sort have your worst interests at heart."
Agreed… but I don't have any worst interests! Actually I'm not interested in *worst.
I'm joking of course. Thank you for the article.
My fear would be that I would be in hell, with no firewall!
Ironically, you'd think that's where a firewall – in the original, steam locomotive, sense of the word – would be most important, but in the other direction 🙂
As far as traffic in the earth-to-afterlife direction, I'd guess that in the heavenly direction, ports 137, 139 and 445 would be closed. Hellbound, they'd be wide open. (And outbound from hell, I'm thinking there's probably a web proxy enforcing the use of IE6, and no way to spoof your User-Agent.)
No, no… they aren't "writing"… they are "writhing". I imagine them squirming in their seat as they compose the email.
"on a CAR accident!"
Haha. Awesome.
Isn't a CAR accident what happens when the pointer at the head of one of your Lisp lists gets corrupted?
(Boom, tisch! Couldn't resist it.)
Experts in Lisp syntax, orthography, semantics and implementation please read this article (and the comments 🙂 before reply-to-replying:
http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/01/14/prize-…
Then bring it on.
I suppose you could reply posthumous …. sorry 🙂
Main Port for Hell is 666
I'd be more interested to hear if there was a good firewall in Hell!
I think we'd have found out by now if there wasn't 😉
Correct. "writhing", like maggots do.
Of course there's an earth-to-heaven router, where else did you think the "cloud" computing service providers are based!
"cloud" services must be an invention of the devil, in heaven it's called clustered computing.
…we received notification from one Mr. Freddie Ficklin of USA….
And now for something completely different.
I got this spam a few months ago, and replied: "Yes, the owner of this email is recently deceased. However, he left a sizable inheritance with no clear instructions on how to disburse it. Were you an acquaintance of the deceased, and would you be willing to pay the contract fees to release this money to you?"
I never got an answer.