Does your mate send smut vids on Facebook? 1. That's a bit weird. 2. It may be malware A security researcher is warning of an ongoing attack against Facebook users in which a phony Flash Player download tries to take over their computers. The distribution mechanism is fairly commonplace – a video message purporting to be pornography is sent to someone on Facebook, and suggests a Flash upgrade is required to play …
That it's only 110,000 infections from this in two days. I think the common belief is that "oh, it's FB, it has to be safe". Back in the day, I heard that one from a lot of AOL users, then Myspace/Yahoo, now the same ill-founded belief about FB.
Rhetorical question to self while shaking head: Are people still really that stupid?
"Rhetorical question to self while shaking head: Are people still really that stupid?"
Always were, always will be.
I gave this argument many years ago (in the win3 days), and during discussion with associates on to how one needs to obscure malware to get it out in the wild.
I said, don't bother, don't try, don't put any effort into it at all. Just call it "BigTits.exe" and watch it fly. You won't get everyone, but it really doesn't matter. Getting everyone is excessive hard work because the smarter they are, the harder it is to scam them - it's just not worth the effort.
The Nigerian 419er's use this system. They're actually masters of social engineering, but even they know it's much easier, faster, cheaper and less effort to scam an idiot, rather than someone with streetsmarts for the same money.
So, the scammers have only one single concern: How many idiots are left? Let's just say, whoever you ask, it appears the sun will blow up before the idiots are finally eradicated.
I also put a bit of effort into explaining why whatever the idiot did might not be a good idea, but that was only for the length (if that) of how long it took to clean up the mess. It simply wasn't worth expending the effort. There's an ever increasing supply of idiots and there is a never ending demand for them as employees or consumers. Short of culling the herd, which sadly isn't permitted, it's not worth wrecking my health.
On the flip side, proving one's self not an idiot, well the keys to nirvana might be yours. I wasn't a complete BOFH. Usually.
I had an email, saying that it had a link to a message on Twitter. Which I've just started to look at, which made it more plausible. From what sounded like it could be a relation.
But, email came from a gmail acct and there was a message with a link telling me I had to update Flash to start it.
So I clicked the link...
No, just kidding! :-)
But I did go to my Flash to see if it did need an update - which of course it didn't.
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