Email Scam: Boston Globe recently was reporting on a woman receiving an email from Publishers’ Sweepstakes she won but need to pay taxes and some fees first. She called the phone number and a nice young woman congratulate her and urged her to keep it confidential and don’t tell anyone, even her family so it can be a surprise. Right?! Below is excerpt of another email received this past week.
“My name is Warren E. Buffett an American business magnate, investor and philanthropist. am the most successful investor in the world. I believe strongly in‘giving while living’ I had one idea that never changed in my mind ? that you should use your wealth to help people and i have decided to give {$1,500,000.00} One Million Five Hundred Thousand United Dollars, to randomly selected individuals worldwide. On receipt of this email, you should count yourself as the lucky individual.”
Visiting Geeks: Am I lucky or what? Who doesn’t know Warren Buffett, the oracle financier hailed from Omaha? Forget about grammatical mistakes and typos. I’ll take ‘United Dollars’ whatever that is. Smile and hit your <delete> key.
My first encounter of computer breach happened almost 40 years ago when I just started as a systems programmer after graduating from MIT. My computer terminal was mis-behaving at random intervals. Sensing a potential intruder, I wrote a small system utility to monitor and trap the offender. Once trapped, my utility would identify and lock the hacker’s computer, display a 5-second count down clock and promptly crash the computer when the clock ticked to 0. It didn’t take long to identify and confront the culprit. I smacked his head with a rolled up newspaper!