Scams

...today I'm waxing nostalgic about a piece of malware. Not one of those anniversaries that have filled so many blogs, articles and videos recently (happy birthday, dear Brai-ain....), but something that just popped into my mailbox...

...many scams work by panicking victims into taking some unwise action, whether it's parting with their credit card details or opening a malicious program, claiming that some problem or illegal action is associated with their computer or IP address, such as transmitting malware or visiting paedophile or other pornographic sites...

...Andrew Lee conducted a fun but disquieting thought experiment in the course of an amusing and informative presentation on user education at the recent Virus Bulletin Seminar...

My colleague Urban Schrott, from ESET Ireland, wrote a nice feature article for our monthly ThreatSense report (which should be available shortly on the Threat Center page at http://www.eset.com/threat-center) on seasonal scams. As the scam season is starting to get into full swing, we thought it might be good to give it a wider audience here.

In the security industry, we're sometimes over-ready to be over-prescriptive, seeing security and privacy concerns as paramount where others see them as a distraction. And we've become used to the mindset that computer users will always prefer convenience to security.