The editorial to September’s Computers in Business (the ICT supplement with the Sunday Business Post) was a disgrace, as I mentioned at the time.
Two months later we find the editor, Adrian Weckler, continuing in a similar vein. “Time to wise up to phishing attacks” he calls and then goes on to make more inane comments on a subject he is not qualified to speak on:
people are still being duped by ridiculously obvious fake emails in alarmingly large numbers
I’d love to be able to agree with him, but as I’ve seen so many of the phishing emails I would have to disagree. The vast majority of them are not “ridiculously obvious fake emails” – if they were people wouldn’t be duped.
Yes people should be more careful and if you honestly wanted to help stop phishing fraud you could underline some of the cold hard facts:
- Never give out personal information via email
- Financial institutions will never ask you to verify details via email
- ebay and paypal will never ask you to verify details via email
But no, the editor of Computers in Business seems to get some level of perverse pleasure in treating the public as if they were all idiots and if you are unlucky enough to be duped you better not tell him about it, as he’d probably laugh.
I wonder would he be so flippant if he was duped?
I somehow doubt it.
I wouldn’t be surprised if he acts that way about it precisely because he fell for some sort of online scam – even if its just clicking on that nekkid Kournikova jpg.exe attachment. I see that happen quite often – people fall for something silly – and then, once recovered from the embarrassmant, they start to act all arrogant and “you’d have to be real stupid to fall for that” so they seem educated (at least in their own compensating minds), and so that no-one would ever possibly imagine that it could have happened to them. Tech journalists are easy bait for this sort of thing.
Lee
Maybe he was stung. Maybe he wasn’t. In either case I find it abhorrent.
An tImeall #42 : Eachtraí Dawn and Drew
An tImeall, daily podcast as Gaeilge. This week’s “Net Review” features Dawn and Drew, new gaelblogs, phishing, the Sony rootkit, and a debate by Irish bloggers on Irish and the Leaving Cert.