Gullibility: Bad; Skepticism: Good

First, the obvious denotative meanings:

gullible: easily duped or cheated

skeptical: relating to, characteristic of, or marked by skepticism: 1 : an attitude of doubt or a disposition to incredulity either in general or toward a particular object
2 a : the doctrine that true knowledge or knowledge in a particular area is uncertain b : the method of suspended judgment, systematic doubt, or criticism characteristic of skeptics

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I’d bet the post title led regular readers to think this post’d be about politics. Well, it could as easily have been, but no.

I am, on the one hand, amused by all the spam I still get that attempts to gull me into opening infected attachments. I filter my email two ways, so spam in my inbox is way down from the hundred per day I once received to just a few a day. But still, I get at least 3 or 4 emails a week with infected attachments that some spammer thinks he can fool me into opening. Such as,

Microsoft has released an update for Microsoft Outlook / Outlook Express. This update is critical and provides you with the latest version of the Microsoft Outlook / Outlook Express and offers the highest levels of stability and security.

Instructions

* Install Update for Microsoft Outlook / Outlook Express (KB910721). To do this, follow these steps:
1. Run attached file officexp-KB910721-FullFile-ENU.exe
2. Restart Microsoft Outlook / Outlook Express

Riiiight. As though Microsoft sent out critical updates as email attachments. Not. Any moron with more active brain cells than a head of cabbage would sneer at this attempt to gull users into self-infection. I didn’t even bother to rescan the thing, since it didn’t get flagged by resident AV on its way in (some don’t, you know). The “sender” was… me. That’s right, the email header was forged to make it appear that I sent the email that was supposedly from Microsoft to myself.

Silly spammer. As though such silly stunts would fool me. I do have more active brain cells than a head of cabbage. Just. *heh*

I don’t know how anyone who is able to press the “On” button on a computer could be stupid enough to fall for that, but surely after viewing the following information, even a head of cabbage would hesitate to open any attachment:

(Yeh, I smudged some of the info in this image expanded header.)

Of course, if I’d been either operating Thunderbird Portable in a sandbox or viewing my mail in a Mint or PCBSD VM at the time, I’d have played around with the attachment a bit. As it is, I didn’t even open it in a sandbox with a text editor. Why play with it when I know I’d just end up deleting it anyway?

So I did. Just delete it. With extreme prejudice.

(BTW, I regularly use an “eraser” utility to scrub any files quarantined by AV, as well as to scrub both free space on my drives and page files on boot. Just sayin’.)