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  • Chain emails

    Many years ago, I worked for $(FEDERAL_AGENCY). I was a very small cog in a very large machine that did really neat scientific stuff.

    At some point, we got our email system hooked up to the Internet at large, and were able to correspond with others over the computer. A while after that, the "Good Times Virus" email chain went around. That's the one with the impressive-sounding technobabble like "puts your computer into an Nth-complexity binary loop" without making any actual sense. Knowing something about how computers work, I just chuckled and deleted it.

    Fast forward a year or so, and we had seen "Good Times" messages come around a few times. I would just delete them and go on with my day.

    Until....

    About two days after deleting the latest round of the chain, I got the message back again from a different source. This time, more information had been added to it. In particular, a note that "I got this from my friend who works for $(FEDERAL_AGENCY), so it must be real!!"

    Being young and arrogant, I immediately did a "respond all", pointing out that this is obvious nonsense and that the IT team at $(FEDERAL_AGENCY) had not said anything about it in the year or more that the messages had been circulating, and that it in no way had the blessing of $(FEDERAL_AGENCY). And that whoever passed it on was behaving in a very gullible and foolish way. It seemed to work, because I never saw another copy of it with that section added.

    A few days later, my boss' boss' boss stopped by. Turns out that the person who had forwarded it along who worked at $(FEDERAL_AGENCY) was the chief attorney for our piece of the agency. And he was not happy about being called (not in so many words) a blithering idiot. So my boss' boss' boss literally slapped my wrist and said "bad boy, don't do it again."

    And a day after *that*, we got an all-hands message that any virus warnings should be forwarded to our IT people, and not sent along to people outside the agency without IT blessing.

    Oddly enough, the attorney's wife wound up working with me later at the same facility. I never mentioned the escapade to her...
    “There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged.
    One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world.
    The other, of course, involves orcs." -- John Rogers

  • #2
    It is amazing how many IT infractions are caused by the higher ups in an organization. Truly amazing.

    In the agency I worked for a co-worker was accused of having some porn on his computer. He, and the union, insisted on scanning everyone's computers. The case was quickly dropped after most of the high ranking directors were shown to be the biggest, and mostly only, offenders.

    Heck, pre-computer one of the directors ran an x-rated video rental service from his desk.
    "I don't have to be petty. The Universe does that for me."

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    • #3
      Most of the time, the biggest vulnerability a computer has... is the organic element. It's far easier to convince some meatbag to allow access than to convince the digital guardians to open up.
      Sadly, said meatbags are easily duped by the dumbest, simplest, little tricks, bypassing all possible digital protections. It'd be bad if it were single-event breaches, but the idiots just DO NOT learn. Far from learning, they'll add their stupidity to the scam to help fool the next victim. (as shown in the addition to the chain-scam-email)

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