[extropy-chat] Spam

BillK bill at wkidston.freeserve.co.uk
Tue Dec 30 23:49:29 UTC 2003


On Tue Dec 30, 2003 12:38 pm Spike wrote:
> Here's one to watch for: one day you get a spam which
> shows a shocking image of child pornography or abuse,
> which pops up without your doing anything. Then a
> message comes up a little later which claims to be from
> a government agency of some sort, saying that it has
> detected an illegal downloaded image of child pornography
> on the hard disk, making the owner of that computer
> punishable by 10 yrs in the slammer, etc.
>

Apparently similar blackmail type spams started about a year ago.

<http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=internetNews&storyID=4056938>

Cyber Blackmail Wave Targets Office Workers
Tue December 30, 2003 07:50 AM ET
By Bernhard Warner, European Internet Correspondent

LONDON (Reuters) - Cyber blackmail artists are shaking down office
workers, threatening to delete computer files or install pornographic
images on their work PCs unless they pay a ransom, police and security
experts said.

Police say crime gangs have turned cyber extortion into a tidy business
of late.

A preferred tool is the crude, but effective denial-of-service attack on
a company's network, capable of crippling it with an overwhelming flood
of data.

There are scores of cases of companies -- particularly small and
medium-sized firms -- receiving extortion threats that demand the victim
transfer money to the fraudster's bank account or the attacks will grow
in severity, police said.

Fraudsters also send out streams of menacing e-mails with hollow threats
of cyber sabotage. The scam works even if only a handful of the
countless recipients follow through and pay up.

"It's getting simpler," said Hypponen. "If you wanted to extort money
from a small company you would have had to hack them and convince them
you have stolen their information. Here, you don't have to do anything
but send an e-mail around."

---------

The warning is - Not only don't reply to spam, but don't even read it or
they will start playing mind games with you.

BillK






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