Cyberspace Article #4 - Celebrity Viruses

Date - June 20, 2005
Publication - CNNMoney.com

Summary of Article
Although this article was made over a year ago, the report described still rings true today as it did last year and the year before. Many hackers/spammers are finding new and cunning ways to lure people into opening emails with viruses. This article briefly reports on the most common ways they entice people to open emails from unknown email addresses - with covering the trap with the most popular and talked about people of America.
Popular names include:

• Britney Spears
• Jennifer Lopez
• Shakira
• Osama Bin Laden
• Michael Jackson
• Bill Clinton
• Anna Kournikova
• Paris Hilton
• Pamela Anderson

Spammers and hackers are known to post to lists and lists of email addresses with phony news events of world-wide known people as these to lure people in, like any deviant person would to a small innocent child. An example the article used was posting emails about Michael Jackson committing attempted suicide just before the final Jury's final charges about Michael's child molestation scandal. If new information like this is posted all around the news for public viewing on a mass scale, wouldn't topics straight of the news interest just about everyone on the internet? That's what spammers ask themselves. And so that's what people have to be careful about when viewing email. Here are some of my tips in avoiding virus:

• Have at least one anti-virus on your computer and one anti-virus checker on your email. Scan your computer at least once a fortnight or more - depending on how many hours you spend on the net.
• Don't subscribe to websites that don't seem trustworthy or ask if you want to subscribe to outside sources to the website. If the website has too many advertisements, pop-ups or looks unprofessional or untidy, don't send your email address to any part of it's data without deciding carefully whether you trust it or not.
• Use common sense - Don't open emails when the senders email address doesn't make any literate sense. For example, if the sender is "dl9hentlwlrk1354bwlb40@elelkhrk30539jn.com" with the subject "Hot Hot Girls", don't open the email at all!!! Curiousity killed the cat! Delete that spam!
• Use your block filter on your junk folder. I know sometimes the settings can make you miss a friend's email that you haven't saved in your contacts yet, but it's worth having a filter that gets rid of the junk you want to get rid of. Block the email addresses as well.
  

Impact On Society
Well I already explained how to protect yourself from the impact. Basically this tells society to get into shape with what to look out for with viruses on emails. In fact it uses a shock factor and attraction factor by using Britney Spears as a way to interest the reader. The article has a picture of Britney Spears when none of what the article talks about affects the way Britney looks or acts at all, in fact if you really thought about it, this article is using the same technique as a hacker would - sneakily attract the reader with a popular name then once it is opened the article contains information completely different. How ironic is that?

>Tracking Life Online
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2005/online.evolution/

This here is interesting information to compare while I was looking around the CNN website for something good for this article. If you look at most of those names up there, they are quite similar to the top 10 list of the names hackers and spammers use. What does this comparison say about society? Are we all the enticers or are we the enticed? What I think is that both of these top 10 lists reflect what we see in mainstream popularity - status of who we are and who we are better than. Is there really any need to keep up to date on the most juiciest updates on the news or gossip? Is it really important to have all the latest mp3's or know the more than the other person usually has knowledge on? Is it really important to feel better or more important than the next person in line?