Social Engineering – gets automated
Social engineering got automated with the early software viruses.
These early viruses infected a computer, opened the user’s address book, and then mailed themselves to everyone in the address book. The virus made use of the connections of the infected person to spread its own DNA around the world. This was in effect an “automated” form of social engineering.
Once this began, nothing was ever the same again.
Not only does this make it easy for the virus to obtain target email addresses, but it also takes advantage of the trust of the recipient of the infected message. That’s important! That word trust. The recipient knows the person the virus came from, and thus has his or her defenses “down” and is more likely to open the infected attachment than if it arrived from a stranger. This exploitation of trust is going to come up again and again, and is the core of both the way the virus works, and the way you defend yourself against viruses.
More recently this address-book harvesting technique has become unnecessary because there are huge lists of automatically-harvested email addresses that can be used for these mailings.
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Welcome
Malware— It’s software that does bad stuff.
It has been around long enough to develop a family history, and it spreads by enticing humans to carry out its will. Here is the story of where it came from and some of the insidious ways it spreads! CyberSpark.net
This site is the companion site to CyberSpark.net — Keeping the flame of free speech and human rights alive online. CyberSpark watches for intrusions and alerts webmasters when critical web sites have been compromised.The Story of Malware
Read about where malware comes from and how it gets into trouble everywhere it goes. You'll laugh, you'll cry— you'll never forget these heartwrenching tales of espionage and betrayal.
