snowdeal.org > ex machina: pattern recognition, context and social engineering

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."

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8/21/2003 11:10:00 PM 0 comments

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