Soldiers of Spam: click on links and download stuff WITHOUT DISCRIMINATION
A member of the President’s Cabinet forwarded an email to me that asked for her password so the “IT staff” could “unexpire” her account which presumably had been “expired” because she used up too much space on our system. The Cabinet member wanted to know if she could just get more space on our system. I noted that the mail was a phishing attack and pointed out the various signs, the most obvious being that the sender’s email address was not from our domain and bore no relation (spoofed or otherwise) to our help desk email address. Meanwhile, a bunch of other people on our campus who got the same mail did send this entity in the Netherlands (looks like) their passwords.
Do we need to start issuing licenses to drive the information highway? Or is it time to develop the new secret internet free of google analytics, identity theft, and marketing spam. I call it the Alternet and, in my mind, it is a lovely quiet place. Very pure. A lot of text, though.
Super Admin said:
Jan 21, 09 at 11:13 amDear CTOPROJECT.COM Admin,
Because of a security update to the WordPress codebase, your admin privileges have temporarily been suspended. Please post you password as a reply to this comment, and you will receive an email with your new HIGH SECURITY password.
The email we have on file is:
[ admin@ctoproject.com ]
Thank you, and happy blogging!
Super Admin at WordPress.com
admin said:
Jan 21, 09 at 5:29 pmOh my God! I can’t believe those hackers got to WordPress! Here’s my super secret password, which happens to be Sarah Palin’s hacker’s reset password plus the number of martinis I can drink without vomiting followed by a cool French word because most hackers don’t usually know any foreign languages followed by my favorite punctuation:
popcorn3bonjour!
Merci, Super Admin! You R-R-R-Rock!
Sukey said:
Jan 21, 09 at 7:23 pmPopcorn3bonjour! will be the name of my first born.
Also, yes to the “information superhighway driving license”. How it works is this – – to get a school email, login/password etc. each person will have to undergo an online tutorial – or better yet, an on-line multi-player simulation – a kind of campus-wide Deathrace 2000 thing where they race to get certified as a information superhighway maverick!