You knew it had to happen

I have to check my spam or junk email folder every now and again. It’s not that I like looking for the nonsense that ends up in there; it’s that periodically some good content mistakenly ends up there.

For the most part, it’s a fruitless exercise and I just end up selecting everything and deleting it.

As I scan the current cache of messages, I see

• information about golf courses
• offers for dates
• testimonials about making thousands of dollars working from home
• stuff about video door bells
• casinos – not sure if they’re online or not and I really don’t care

These don’t interest me enough to even open the message because, as we all know, they just want me to click links or download attachments and then try to steal personal information.

Then, there’s a new couple

I don’t know about you but I use email these days to communicate with some people and subscribe to mailing lists. Generally, these are easy messages to determine the originator. I recognize most of the quite readily.

I can’t think of any case where I get or even entertain the thought of a message from someone or thing named “Fight Corona”. Fortunately, the message comes with a snippet to let you know a bit about the context of the message. As you can see, these are easily determined to be totally worthless.

Even more worthless are the scum that actually create those messages. There is no actual reason to even open the message to see what’s inside. I hope there’s a special place in hell for those that send this crap out, trying to entice people to click on links or attachments. In this case, they’re capitalizing on the fear that society has and the media is providing updates 24/7 with each report trying to be more sensational than the previous one.

We read all the time about systems that get compromised by employees opening messages and infecting systems. Shame on them and shame on an employer that doesn’t provide the necessary skills to be cautious.

Providers have the tools to identify the stuff created by these miscreants. I guess it’s not perfect because they simply end up in a spam or junk folder and I’m ultimately the person to determine whether or not it’s of value.

If it’s nothing else, it’s a reminder that schools need to step up and showing students how to detect stuff like this and how to handle it.

It’s just too bad that the technology couldn’t be used to go one step further and identify who is sending this stuff and charge them criminally. Until we reach that level, there’s really no effective deterrent.

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