Friday, January 15, 2010

Why do they do it?

As it happens I am expecting a parcel from England which is now overdue. Yesterday, I got an email which purported to have come from UPS about a parcel so my first thought was that it might be relevant.

Before I could open it though, Avira had scanned it and found it contained a virus. The program therefore prevented me from opening the email by deleting it.

Today I got another email that was also supposedly from UPS. This time I could read the message which said that I had a parcel which they couldn’t deliver because the address was wrong. There was an attachment which apparently contained the relevant information. You guessed, the attached file contained a virus which Avira once more picked up and deleted for me.

The first clue should have been that neither email had an UPS logo nor came from an official UPS domain. However I missed that; without Avira, I would now have an infected computer.

Why do people do this? What do they gain from sending out infected emails? It beggars belief.

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