Some of you may have received an email similar to the one below:
**************
Hey, some jerk has posted your pictures (u understand what kind of pictures are there) and sent a link of them to all ur friends. I have already replied back. Said, that he is an idiot. See the link:
http://photobank.********.****.*****/id1073bv/get.php?email={Your Email is here}
{SOME NAME}
**************
Newsflash folks, they haven’t. Well, at least not the people purporting to have done so in this email!
Educate your users, don’t click on the link. We’ve had a user actually do so and managed to infect their machine. To most, it seems more of a pain to clean it than anything. But let’s put it this way: Your technical company (or your internal technical person) has to go clean this up. Say your outsourcing firm charges $100 per hour. Something like this takes at least 2 to 3 hours to clean let alone ensure it has been eradicated. I’m not counting the checks of ALL your other systems on the network. Now we’re talking more along the lines of 5 or 6 hours. Now factor in the cost of the downtime to the user who has been infected. Now you’re looking at $1,000 or more in real money that has been lost. Now factor in there is the very real possibility this user has had documents lost or destroyed by this virus.
User education doesn’t seem so expensive any more.
Posted under Information/Advisories, Podcasts
This post was written by Aaron on February 3, 2010
