The Network Garden - Mark Sigal's Blog: 'Whaling': Larger Prey As Targets of Phishing Scams

MOST RECENT READS

Michael Pollan: The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
In terms of pure readability, I enjoyed In Defense of Food more, but this book feels more important in how it delineates the 'self-perpetuating' ethos of Big Corn, and what that yields in our society. OD looks at the Industrial Beef industry, organic farms, the industrial-scaling of organic, and the more holistic 'polyface' farms. It does all of this in a way that while not completely neutral, isn't snarky, dismissive and judgmental either. If you care about what you eat and why, this book is an eye-opener.
Kevin Kelly: What Technology Wants
A profound piece of work that looks at evolution in organic systems and expands the schema to technological ones. The book presents a unified theory about how life, systems and logic extend over time and space, and what it all means. This one will stick with me for a long time.
Walter Isaacson: Steve Jobs
I have just begun reading it, and while sad knowing the end for SJ, it puts many a smile on the face, seeing how fascinated my kids are by a man they never knew (but whose products they love), and recollecting the last book that I read on Apple thirteen years ago, 'Apple' by Jim Carlton, which was utterly depressing.
Andy Kessler: Eat People: And Other Unapologetic Rules for Game-Changing Entrepreneurs
I consider Kessler to be one of the better analytical minds out there with an extremely enjoyable, amusing writing style. This book, however, was a case of what should have been a 50 pager stretched into 250. As such, it got to be a tired read, and Kessler loses a bit of credibility when he pushed horizontal as the end-all, be-all while trying to downplay the significance of Apple and Amazon as largely vertically integrated businesses. Plus, while he pushes the defensibility of being a market entrepreneur over a political entrepreneur, his arguments read a bit weak when placed alongside our current political climate where political entrepreneurs (think: Wall Street) are more powerful than ever. A disappointment by an excellent writer.
Chip Heath: Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard
This is a generally enjoyable read, and if I hadn't read so many business and management books over the years I would enjoy this even more. The big knock (for me) on this category is that all of these books have a core metaphor or three that anchor their truth and shape their narrative. Effectively, these things are pneumonic devices, so on some level, the question comes down to how much I will remember of the specifics in 90 days? Probably not so much, although it will definitely reinforce and reinvigorate the stuff that I am already doing.
Frederick P. Brooks: The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer Scientist
Brooks wrote the classic on team development dynamics, 'The Mythical Man-Month' so he is already highly qualified in my book. In particular, this book is affirming a lot of my philosophies on development and design, especially as a proponent of the Spiral Model. I especially like the chunk on Conceptual Integrity in design. Somewhat of a dry read is the only negative, and this is not a book for design newbies, as a lot of the context would be obtuse for this audience.
Bill Simmons: The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to The Sports Guy
First, some caveats. I am both a HUGE basketball fan (go LAKERS!) and an enthusiastic reader on Bill Simmons writings for ESPN.com. This book is funny but long (~700 pages), and even though it's easy to read one chapter at a time, I devoured it in about 10 days. Why? It fits my axiom of great objective approaches to subjective topics. Bill may not be right in all of his assessments, but he is never confused. Very entertaining, and I learned a ton about the evolution of NBA basketball, and methods for comparing players from different eras. Strongly recommended.
Malcolm Gladwell: Outliers: The Story of Success
This was an excellent book, with Gladwell providing a crisp narrative with clear analogs and ample stories to codify his positions on the elements of successful people. As a frame of reference, I LOVED The Tipping Point and most of his New Yorker pieces but found Blink to be a great big MEH.
Stephen Lowenstein: My First Movie: Take Two: Ten Celebrated Directors Talk About Their First Film
I love films, am a (nascent) student of the art of film-making and am knee-deep in the story-telling and entertainment realm, vis-a-vis my iPhone gaming company, Unicorn Labs. Plus, I am blogging/writing more than ever so understand the mechanics of audience, economy of narrative and sacrificing your "children" (i.e., good dialog and written word) to realize that end. As such, very engaged in reading how different directors went from directorial "virgins" to proven auteurs. About 30 pages in, enjoying it a good deal.
Michael Lewis (Author): The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
I have already read a number of excerpts from Vanity Fair, watched the 60 Minutes segment on this and blogged extensively on the crisis so REALLY looking forward to this. Love Lewis' writing style, save for Blind Side, which couldn't get through.

You receive an email message appearing to be an official subpoena from the United States District Court in San Diego.

Visually, the message looks official, includes your name, company name and phone number, and commands the recipient to appear before a grand jury in a civil case.

What do you do?

Unlike most e-mail phishing scams, this one passes the sniff test. “I think that it was well done in terms of something people would feel compelled to respond to,” said Steve Kirsch, the chief executive of Abaca, an antispam company based in San Jose, Calif, and a recipient of one of the 'subpoenas'. “Even the U.R.L. to find out more looked legitimate at first glance.”

Clicking on the link embedded in the message (which purports to offer a copy of the entire subpoena) results in the recipient who tries to view the document unwittingly downloading and installing software that secretly records keystrokes and sends the data to a remote computer over the Internet. This lets the criminals capture passwords and other personal or corporate information.

Scary stuff specifically because it does pass the sniff test, and according to the New York Times article spotlighting this, well targeted too (whaling is a play on the phishing term):

Thousands of high-ranking executives across the country have been receiving e-mail messages this week that appear to be official subpoenas from the United States District Court in San Diego. Each message includes the executive’s name, company and phone number, and commands the recipient to appear before a grand jury in a civil case.

Several security researchers said that the real danger of the attack lay in a second level of deception, after the hidden software provided the attackers with digital credentials like passwords and electronic certificates.

Despite the seemingly easy-to-trace domain name, the feds guess this originates from China, and as such will be hard to stop.

Membership has its privileges, I guess. Welcome to the underbelly of the global economy.

Comments

It is kind of a whaling attack targeting big fishes in corporate offices like CEO’s, top executives and managers.

“This is one of the best phish e-mails I've seen in the past 6 years” quoted by Mr. Steve Kirsch, a well known Silicon Valley entrepreneur

Remember, that it is not legal to send subpoena via emails unless it is agreed by the people. Also All US Federal courts have URLs of the form “courtname.uscourts.gov” and not in the form
“uscourts.com” mentioned in email. So Beware of these kinds of mails. The Abaca Email Protection Gateway (http://www.abaca.com/) service was the only service I know that quarantined these emails.

Posted by: victor louis | April 17, 2008 at 12:30 AM