snowdeal logo

archives archives

ex machina


pattern recognition, context and social engineering

oh those clever worm writers. i'm assuming this email is sobig or a variant which claims to come from security@microsoft.com and comes complete with patch.exe. if the grammer were a little better, i'm sure they'd get a few takers. it's a perfect example of the new breed of social viruses that exploit your sense of authority:

"These are big, powerful email addresses like support@ebay.com, sales@amazon.com or (oof) blogdex[at]media.mit.edu. Even though people know not to open attachments, the authority of that email address throws an exception in their brains and thus the virus is propagated. It's a new breed of virus, and it's spreading like crazy.

Of course after another few months of IT castigation, the email world will return to normal. But this is an arms race between email virus authors and the pattern recognition in all of our brains. For every patch that a network administrator makes by slapping our wrists, someone is engineering more and more sophisticated techniques for bypassing our preconceptions."

bookmark: del.icio.us ::digg it ::furl ::reddit ::yahoo ::
8/21/2003 11:10:00 PM 0 comments

0 Comments:

Post a Comment


[ rhetoric ]

"it is hard to be brave," said piglet, sniffing slightly, "when you're only a Very Small Animal." rabbit, who had begun to write very busily, looked up and said: "it is because you are a very small animal that you will be Useful in the adventure before us."

the complete tales & poems of winnie the pooh

[ about ]

this site chronicles the continuing adventures of my son, odin, who was unexpectedly born on the fourth of july at 25 weeks gestation, weighing 1 pound 7 ounces.

he's quite a fighter and you can always send him a postcard to the most current address listed here if you're inspired by his adventures. see the postcard project/google maps mashup to see a map of the postcards.

if you're new, you can browse the archives to catch up. and don't forget to watch a few movies that i made while we were in the neonatal intensive care unit. or if you want the abridged version and you can find a copy, you can read about his adventures in the november 2005 issue of parents magazine.



[ search ]

[ outbound ]

daddytypes / blogging baby /

rebeldad / thingamababy / The Continuing Adventures of Super-Preemie / dooce /

[ schwag ]

look snazzy and support the site at the same time by buying some snowdeal schwag!

[ et cetera ]

valid xhtml 1.0?

This site designed by
Eric C. Snowdeal III .
© 2000-2005