'Tsunami' bogus email

@ 'Tsunami' bogus email

You'd have to be a particularly low form of human life to take advantage of a tragedy like the tsunami -- but alas they are out there.  There's the usual load of emails posing as requests from various charities or variations on the 'Nigerian' scam.

Now there's a full blown worm doing the rounds.    It arrives with the subject 'Tsunami donation! Please help!" and contains an attachment called tsunami.exe .  

@ Email Worm as News Headline

While it doesn't seem to have spread very far there is a nasty email doing the rounds posing as news headlines from CNN.  To make it harder to detect and look legitimate the worm changes its subject and message text by grabbing headlines from the CNN web site.  There's nothing CNN can do about this - anyone can grab or 'scrape' text from a web site automatically.

The worm will silently track your keystrokes and send the data to a hackers web site -- a longstanding way to grabbing passwords and credit card details from the unwary.

Thankfully any decent anti-virus / anti-spam program that's up to date will detect this nasty and remove it before any harm is done.

@ The Subject is not the message

Some emailers try to make their messages as short as possible by putting their entire message into the subject line and leave the body of the message entirely blank. 

I received an email the other day that seemed to be blank, just before deleting the message I noticed the subject line was very long it said:  Your last email to me was put in the spam folder, please fix this immediately.

(Let's leave aside the fact that the sender of an email message can't do much, if anything, to effect the spam filters at the receivers end and there was no indication of what message was classified as spam.)

Many modern email clients, Outlook and Outlook Express especially only show the first characters of a subject -- all I saw was 'your email to me' and the rest wasn't on the screen at all.   In web-based email the subject also gets cut-off, especially if the receiver uses a portable device like a Blackberry or WAP based email.

It's a cute trick but sadly not practical.  Using only the subject doesn't save much, if any, in the size of the message and you run the risk that your email won't be read.

hey thanks a lot for that warning!! 👏

thanks for the warning, cdesai 👏👏👏 people are sick...🤢

Thanks for sharing Cdesai.
I can't believe people take advantage of such a heart breaking natural disaster. 🤢 🤢