This is something I’ve been pondering lately entirely unrelated to any specific Comodo product but perhaps at least mildly interesting to those interested in computer security…
Anyway, I have two email accounts that I use regularly. One I give out everywhere (such as when websites want you to register with an email address, etc) and the other I am extremely careful (extremely as in near-paranoid level of caution) about who gets that address. Obviously, the first email account I mentioned gets tons of spam, despite my best “block sender’s domain” efforts.
Up until very recently, the vast majority of the ScamSpam™ I received at that address was either just unsolicited advertisements or “send us all your personal info and we will send you 2 million dollars from Nigeria” style scams. However, in the last week or so I have started to receive scam emails that say things like “You have won the international United Nations lotto! This is not a scam! See attachment for details…” and the attachment is a Microsoft Word document. Now, obviously the attached Word document is probably infested with various types of malicious code and I never ever open them.
Now, my whole point of telling that story was to ask this question: Is it just me, or has something happened recently that has caused a lot of hackers/phishers/scammers to think that a lot of people are stupid enough to open an attachment from a complete stranger that promises millions of dollars? Now I realize a few people are probably going to open it regardless, but isn’t Computer Security 101 - Do Not Open Attachments? I consider myself to be more security conscious (paranoid?) than the average computer user, and I won’t even open an attachment from my own mother (seriously. She’s complained to me about it.) So… Are there a large number of scammers out there thinking, for whatever reason, that .doc attachments are a viable attack, or has something happened in the last couple of weeks that I don’t know about?