John Pescatore breaks down phishing, pharming, spam, viruses, and the rest of the social engineering-related Badness starting with his generation and working his way down, finally thinking about the children.

As today’s 9 year olds start using the web, they will be even more suspicious of what they see on their always online PC screen.

This could mean that 10 years from now, as today’s 19 year olds become tomorrow’s 29 year old office workers, that viruses and phishing attacks will be so over - routinely ignored by the targets. Or it could mean that Moore’s and Metcalfe’s laws will give the attackers more ways to create more clever attacks and fool the next generation.

I’m betting on the latter - and not just for job security. Think about the advertising market - they basically have the same problem the online criminals do. They have to try to drive your behavior by showing you a billboard, a TV or newspaper or online ad, or having you listen to an audio ad. They have to trick you into believing that their toothpaste is different than the other 92 brands or that their lite beer will cause Baywatch babes to mudwrestle at the next table over.

I’ve been using email for since I got started with FIDONet over a Hayes Smartmodem 300, or about 70% of my life. I’m in the missing generation of John’s post, which means that I got to see all the Bad Things that could happen even without widespread access to IP networks or the Web.

This includes fun things like having to virus scan a thousand floppies to make sure that you wipe out the office’s Stoned outbreak.

It’s too bad I didn’t have a blog at the time on which to complain about it. Ah, what posts those would have been…

Scanning…
Mood: Bored

Spending my day scanning about a thousand floppies. Yes, 1,000. Another stoned outbreak. This sucks.

Posted at 8:12am in Office Life, Computer Security | No Comments >

Still Scanning
Mood: Irritated

Just finished the hundredth disk. 900 to go. This sucks.

Posted at 9:34am in Office Life, Computer Security | No Comments >

Still Scanning II
Mood: Bored & Irritated

Almost halfway through. I swear, I’m going to make it my life’s mission to find the guy who wrote Stoned and make sure he never writes another line of code.

Posted at 3:14pm in Office Life, Computer Security | No Comments >

Still Scanning III
Mood: Catatonic

Almost finished.

Posted at 5:01pm in Office Life, Computer Security | No Comments >

I’m gonna kill someone…
Mood: Postal

And his name is Julian. Stupid @%$#A just re-infected the entire office with a disk he found under the refrigerator! It still had lint and crap on it so I knew it wasn’t one I cleaned yesterday.

“Where’d you get that disk?” I asked him.

“Why?”

“Because I spent all day yesterday cleaning Stoned off every floppy in the office. You saw the memo because you asked me about it.”

“Oh. From the kitchen.”

“There’s no floppies in the kitchen.”

“Well, it was behind the refrigerator.”

Maybe it’s clean, I’m telling myself.

“Can I see it?” I ask him. “I need to virus scan it.”

“Let me show this document to Jeanie first. She’s the last approval I need.”

“Who else approved it?”

He starts to list of names of half the people in the office. I get that sick feeling in my stomach that tells me fate has some particularly cruel news in store for me.

“No,” I say. “I need to scan it now”

“But–”

I grab the disk from his hands, run for my cube, and fire up the scanner.

Virus scanning…Stoned Virus Found.

Hopefully this won’t be used as evidence of premeditation at my trial.

Posted at 10:23am in Office Life, Computer Security | No Comments >

Yes, it really did happen. No, Julian’s name was not changed to protect the guilty.

Love the “blast from the past” story. The quote from Cool Hand Luke always comes to mind when reading war stories such as that one:
“What we’ve got here is… failure to communicate. Some men you just can’t reach. So you get what we had here last week, which is the way he wants it… well, he gets it. I don’t like it any more than you men.”

One day stupidity will be cured. Until then, centres for reeducation could be useful. :-)