The Wine Commonsewer

What To Do When The CIA Emails You

DELETE IT

Gentle Readers,

Lisa has gotten the offending email containing the Sober worm fifty or sixty times in the last 36 hours.

The latest variations of the Sober worm are depressingly widespread at the moment because people are fooled by messages that appear to come from the FBI or CIA.  A simple and, you’d think, obvious scam but many people are tricked into opening the attachment to the email, so there’s enough people out there who would not find it strange to have the FBI or CIA email them personally.

The messages have an infected email attachment and should be deleted, certainly not opened up.  There’s no risk in reading the message in your email programs preview pane.

The Sober worm itself is nothing new but there’s been an explosion of messages generated by the worm, presumably from people being tricked by the contents of the email.

Nuff Said.

As Ever, TWC

tip of the glass to Office Watch

BCC Really Does Work

Gentle Readers,

At TWC we always mask email addresses when we send group emails by using a function called BCC (Blind Carbon Copy or Blind Courtesy Copy) and we encourage everyone who sends emails to multiple recipients to do that as well. Using Blind CC makes it all that more difficult for spammers to snake other people's email addresses. Peter Deegan at Email Essentials elaborates.

We’ve mentioned this before but we still get questions about the Myth of BCC – Blind Carbon Copy.  This story alleges that spammers can grab your email address from the BCC list in a message, not just TO and CC. This is wrong – and it’s so easily checked that it’s amazing that the story persists. All you have to do is look at the header of an incoming message for a BCC list of addresses – you won’t find one. When you send a message with BCC’s, that list of addresses is stripped out by the sending SMTP server (most likely at your ISP) and BCC’s are sent to each person on the list.

And there is one more consideration. You wouldn't post a friend's cell phone number in public and you should afford them the same courtesy with respect to email addresses.

As Ever, TWC

Amazon Red Cross Scam: A New Low

Gentle Readers:

There's an email circulating in the wake of Katrina that purports to be from Amazon.com and asks for donations to the Red Cross. The email borrows heavily from the Amazon site and looks surprisingly real. It's not.

As with all phishing scams and email solicitations, NEVER click on a link contained in an email from any online store, bank, or credit card company where personal information is solicited. Instead, if you are prompted to take action, go directly to the company website and bypass the email link altogether.

How about cap punishment for these slime balls?

As Ever, The WC