Although certainly no regular reader of this site would self-infect as a result of this piece of “social engineering” y’all may want to pass this on to others.
Facebook password reset themed malware campaign in the wild
Now, regular readers here aren’t among the set of folks who click on attachments in emails that
- a. they were not already expecting AND
- b. hadn’t been AT LEAST manually scanned by a freshly-updated, strong anti-malware software… or two. AND
- c. actually checked the sender’s address out using “view full headers” (or whatever your email client offers) and found it to be from a legitimate, known and trusted sender–for real.
If an attachment satisfies all those requirements, it may be safe to open. May. Frankly, more and more, I “send” files by giving folks an ftp address for download or posting them with Skydrive or some other such site or just posting them here for download. That way, at least folks have a pretty good idea who the file is actually coming from and can base further action on what level of trust they may place in me. Email? With forged headers and other social engineering/obfuscation techniques, naive users often have no idea where a given email came from, and so they often infect themselves.
I don’t excuse them because of their naivete. Naive users have a responsibility to learn safe computing practices. If they infect themselves and go on to spread the infection, well, any stupidity that is advanced enough is virtually indistinguishable from malice.
BTW, I’ve received two emails such as those referred to in the article. The delete key works a charm with them, if my filters haven’t already caught and scrubbed them.