I used to put selected quotes at the bottom of my emails, a practice that broke down when I was forced to give up Emacs as my mail program. The fun part of that was collecting a pool of quotes to pull from. Here’s one of them:
“What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.” — Weizenbaum 76
That’s from Weizenbaum’s paper on Eliza.
I just received a phishing attempt via Skype chat; very primitive. Not as crude as this example though. Reminded me of Eliza. I bet we will see much more sophisticated automation for IM phishing.
Ebay’s acquisition of Skype and the resulting challenge of merging the user accounts creates a moment of high drama in the phishing passion play. Particularly when you recall that Paypal is part of eBay.
There ought to be an FBI site or something you can go to where you can generate a fake account/credit card that is tracked by the FBI computers. They’d need a few bogus RT numbers and such but the whole point would be to “get” stolen and “allow” an identiy theft. All the withdrawls and everything should show up as “over the limit” or whatever but at least then it would be easier to get direct information back to the source with less hassle….
Andy – This is most excellent idea; but it needs work. You’d have to think thru the ways it would get abused. There are a slew of testing numbers in these systems that work perfectly but don’t do anything