Evil Email Tricks (Beta)

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Lies, lies, and damned lies

Deception is the essential element in email from evil doers. Almost everything about an email message and any attachements can be falsified in some way. Most evil email is delivered by spam bots these days, so there is a veritable flood of it. [note]

Does the message look like it was sent by someone you know and trust? Guess again. It's trivially easy to "spoof" the [From:] name and sender address.

Did the message reference something that very few people would know? It's easy to search all the email and other information on one of your contact"s compromised computer. The villan simply composes a message that will look plausible to you.

Is it an urgent message telling you that you need to resolve some pressing problem? It's from your broker and you need to take immediate action. When you do, the evil doer has your account number and password.

Michael Horowitz has good examples of what bad email messages look like.

Open this attachment

Did you just get a message from a friend (or relative) with a cool picture attached. Go ahead, click it. Guess what, it's a trojan horse that also carries a picture so that you never know something bad was installed on your computer.

Or maybe it's a nice birthday card from someone you know. You can see where this is going. ;-)

Curiosity killed the cat, eh?

The [Subject:] is intriguing. Everything else *seems* OK. You open the message before you think. Whatever was going to happen has now happened.

The reason is that Internet bandits have learned how to attack your computer as soon as you read their message. You don't have to click on a thing.

Learn more about evil email

Note: It is possible to be virtually spam free. For several years now, I've gotten less spam in one year than many people do in one day. But that's another story.

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