Al has another post about another company sending mail to a customer that gave an email address that didn’t belong to them. The person receiving the misdirected email has no effective way to make it stop, and is getting more and more frustrated with the ongoing spam. (Consumerist article)
One of the things that never ceases to amaze me about phishers is how incredibly creative they can be in writing text that encourages recipients to open their emails.
There have been two separate incident recently that inspired me to talk about phishing.
The first was watching viruses propagate through my local neighborhood mailing list. I live in Silicon Valley and we do have an email list for neighbors to talk, plan and generally share information. Last week one of the neighbors got infected with a virus, and their address started posting links to more viruses to the list. Over the weekend I watched half a dozen neighbors get infected and post more viruses to the list.
The second is the dozens of messages I’ve been receiving telling me there are naked photos of me on the Internet. They have a couple different forms. Some pretend to be concerned friends worried that my private photos have leaked. Others threaten legal action or that the police are investigating me. Still others tell me I’ve ruined a friendship by sharing these photos.
None of those things are true, of course. They’re all trying to get me to open a file and infect my machine with some virus or another.
Now, in a new paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Justin Rao of Microsoft and David Reiley of Google (who met working at Yahoo) have teamed up to estimate the cost of spam to society relative to its worldwide revenues. The societal price tag comes to $20 billion. The revenue? A mere $200 million. As they note, that means that the “‘externality ratio’ of external costs to internal benefits for spam is around 100:1. Spammers are dumping a lot on society and reaping fairly little in return.” In case it’s not clear, this is a suboptimal situation. The Atlantic
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