Chronic Murmuring

Bagel Virus

This new bagel virus is pretty sharp. Microsoft Outlook is, I'm guessing, pretty attractive to most programmers of these viruses. But people seem to have learned a lot over the last two years or so about the new golden rule of the information economy, which is: never open attachments from strangers. But these virus programmers must just take this as being a challenge, because the viruses keep getting trickier and tricker. Like this bagel one, for instance. I got an email this morning from "administrator@uga.edu." It had all this gobbly gook in it which made it seem authentic, talking about how I was having my email address closed down because I had tried to send an attachment that had been infected by the virus. In fact, it was like the second or third of these I've received over the last few days, but I've been so confused by them that I haven't paid them any attention. But this one caught my attention, because it sounded like I had been sending out infected attachments. Even though I don't use Microsoft Outlook - I use a web server which doesn't have an address book. The email said that if I wanted to reconnect my account, that I would just need to follow the instructions in the attachment that was included in the email. But I decided to, instead, write administrator@uga.edu and ask what in the world was going on, and to see if they could get someone up to my office to check my computer out. They loaded my computer up with all kinds of security goodies, so I was thinking I was pretty safe. Well, sure enough, the email bounces back because there is no "administrator@uga.edu." Then I realized that the whole thing was just an ingenius scam to get me to open the attachment. It was the first time in a while that I actually almost fell for it. I basically don't even look at something, let alone open an attachment, unless I know the person, and even then I'm leery of opening an attachment. But this one really got me. The more I looked at the actual letter, though, the more it seemed like it wasn't as authentic as I thought. (Of course, watch it be real and tomorrow my account gets canceled).