The AVIEN Blog

…but they do morph, from time to time.

I’ve recently seen a couple of chain letters relating to supporting the armed forces that particularly irritate me: as it happens, I do have a close relative serving in the army, and I’m pretty sure that he won’t think we don’t care about him if we don’t wear red on Fridays or forward chain letters.

http://www.snopes.com/glurge/daughter.asp 

A former colleague of my wife’s just forwarded a variation on the “forward this and get a free phone” sub-group of hoaxes that offers a free Sony-Ericsson laptop. (Love the graphic, but the T18 is a phone, not a laptop!)

http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/nothing/ericsson.asp

At NASA, David Morrison has posted his response to the drivel about the world ending in 2012 that has been circulating lately:

http://astrobiology.nasa.gov/ask-an-astrobiologist/intro/nibiru-and-doomsday-2012-questions-and-answers

(Thanks, Gadi.)

And Graham Cluley has blogged on an old favourite that just recrossed his path:

http://www.sophos.com/blogs/gc/g/2009/11/18/simon-ashton-hacker-hoax-spreading-email/ 

IF A PERSON CALLED SIMON ASHTON (SIMON25@HOTMAIL.CO.UK ) CONTACTS YOU THROUGH EMAIL DON'T OPEN THE MESSAGE. DELETE IT BECAUSE HE IS A HACKER!!

Thanks, Graham, but the stuff about the cardboard cutouts is too much information.

Randy Abrams and I did a reserve paper for VB2009 on the whole hoax thing that should be going up on ESET’s white papers page (http://www.eset.com/download/whitepapers.php) soon. I’ll put the link up here when it does.

David Harley FBCS CITP CISSP
Chief Operations Officer, AVIEN

Also blogging at:
http://dharley.wordpress.com/
http://www.eset.com/threat-center/blog
http://blogs.securiteam.com
http://blog.isc2.org/

Tags: "Simon Ashton is a hacker" hoax, 2012, chain letters, David Morrison, Doomday, ESET white papers, hoaxes, NASA, Nibiru, Red Fridays, Sony-Ericsson T18 laptop

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 at 9:07 am and is filed under David Harley, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.