Monday, January 21, 2008

Remember, constant vigilance!

Some of us received this suspicious looking email in our inboxes. It unsurprisingly turned out to be a malicious fake. Here are some of the things wrong with it:

A- "Account Verification process"- aside from the fact that the "p" should probably be capitalized, I've been here for three years and never heard of this.

B- Oh, come on, first off, OIT already knows our passwords, and if they needed us to verify any information at all you'd expect them to do something a little more high-tech than this.

C- Considering the importance of our webmail accounts, that's very threatening languange. It's the sort of thing you'd expect from a chain letter. In any case, you get to keep your webmail account for a few months after graduation, it seems doubtful they'd erase all of your information after only 48 hours.

D- Punctuation is funny.

There are other strange things about this email, like how there's no actual support@princeton.edu email address.

1 comments:

L said...

I did not get this message (perhaps my account is not as cool as other students' accounts), but maybe that's just because my email chewed it up for being grammatically faulty. (You may not know this, but many email providers are secretly grammar-obsessed.) For instance: I'm pretty sure there's a preposition missing in "reply this message," and the comma following the oh so high tech asterisks of doom should be replaced with a semi-colon, as it separates two independent clauses. Also, database is one word.

It's interesting that the new year's spam and now this happened in such close succession to each other. Is this a sign that we need to protect our WebMail service more securely? Maybe a web security program should be the next 126 assignment.