Now they’ve gone too far!
We all get to see our fair share of scams on the internet. It’s inevitable, just like death and taxes. Scams are part of the human nature, and they will exist for as long as we’re not mindless replicas of the same DNA pattern. I, personally, hate them, since they seem very ill-conceived. Yet variations of the same theme keep popping up, which to me indicates that there are a few poor people naive enough to fall into this trap. To avoid being pestered with such scams, you’ll notice that Social Marker doesn’t have an @ in it’s contact address, as this is how programs determine if they’ve found an e-mail address. But a recent discovery makes it seem like even this effort may soon be in vain.
A few days ago, we have received such a scam in our Social Marker contact account. Of course we have the experience needed to tell it’s a scam - since I’m reluctant to believe that a dying woman has randomly picked me over the internet to send me $5.5 million - yet the mere fact that it was there was disturbing. This marks the beginning of a new phase in the war against spam. It seems that the ever-popular @ isn’t the only criteria that modern targeting programs are looking for. You may now have a ‘bullseye’ integrated in your page source without even knowing it.
Of course, there was no actual threat concerning this e-mail. Not yet, anyway. But how long will it be before your e-mail address is bombarded with spam and you don’t know why you. With an increase in the complexity of these programs, a thing as simple as a MySpace account could be a liability. You may think I’m taking the ‘Give me your bank account details so I can give you tons of money’ scam a bit too seriously, but this is only the tip of the iceberg, the first soldier who has penetrated your defense; you simply know that others will follow. There are a lot more harmful things that can be lurking in e-mails, yet even such a scam could be dangerous to newcomers, who lack the experience needed to judge right from wrong. The internet is a wonderful, if at times frustrating, place. No one should be discouraged to use it because of these get-rich-quick schemes.
Still, how long can it be until the day when a virus is able to find your e-mail address off a random site and reproduce itself in an e-mail to all the contacts in your address book, all by itself? If you have confidential data on your computer, yet you haven’t taken the necessary precautions to protect it, rest assured that future viruses will find it. Perhaps this is what Web 3.0 will bring us - a platform where self-sufficient viruses can really take advantage of all available data. The two most important questions that you need to ask yourself now are:
- “How many more of these abuses do we have to take before we learn how to defend ourselves?”
- “Will I be one of the victims?”
