[clue-talk] MS Anti-Spyware Tool Warning (Joke)

[Chris Schock]

> There is an outfit called watchguard.com that will let you set up a fake
> virus and send it to everyone in some set of addresses, such as address
> book.  If they click on the fake virus, they're pointed to a page politely
> chiding them about opening an attachment from an unknown person and the
> risks involved therein (you're expected to use a fake address), and then
> giving you a report showing how many of your friends, users, whatever were
> gullible enough to fall for the virus.
>
> I'm not sure whether you get to find out exactly who bit, so you can call
> and scream at them, or you just get a percentage count showing how many of
> your friends are gullible.
>
> no charge for the service. I have to wonder if it is a ploy for obtaining
> addresses.  I had a hard time making it work because it assumed MS Outlook
> as your mail client and it was somewhat hard to properly configure on real
> mail clients.  I set up an account for myself but so far only sent it to
> one test address to see what it looks like.

That's awesome. And I can't believe there are still people who do that.

As a joke a year or two ago I sent an email to folks in my group that had
a totally uncharacteristic style of writing in it (but was very
virus-like, it had horrible punctuation grammar and spelling) and the
attachment was something like XxX-SupaPorn-XxX.exe - the attachment was
actually a text file I renamed. I was amazed that folks opened it, but
what really got me was that they actually tried opening the executable,
and then came to me to tell me my attachment wouldn't open.

It still makes me shudder.