{"id":1003,"date":"2007-12-14T10:59:47","date_gmt":"2007-12-14T17:59:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=1003"},"modified":"2007-12-14T10:59:47","modified_gmt":"2007-12-14T17:59:47","slug":"merry_christmas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=1003","title":{"rendered":"Merry Christmas, sucker"},"content":{"rendered":"

As if the slutbot<\/a> didn’t give us enough to worry about, spammers and other net-baddies are ramping up their use of holiday e-cards to distribute malware, according<\/a> to the Christian Science Monitor. “While malicious e-cards are not a new problem,” says the Monitor, “their numbers have grown, their tactics have improved, and their victims are still falling for it.”<\/p>\n

It gives a couple examples of this year’s ploys:<\/p>\n

\n

One suspicious e-card crawling the Web this year tries to exploit users’ feistier side. When opened, the e-mail loads an image of a rascal throwing a snowball at your screen. “You have just been hit with an e-mail snowball!” reads the card, which Symantec included in its December spam report. The card tells readers to forward it on to friends and share the fun … “Each time the e-mail is read, a request is sent to the server hosting the image, and the user’s e-mail address is stored … on the spammer’s server,” says the Symantec report. So, next time the spammer wants to send out junk mail, he has a fresh list of addresses.<\/p>\n

Another of this year’s crop put a professional polish on an old trick. The card used Hallmark’s official logo and a convincing e-card template to hide its intentions. All the links led to Hallmark.com, except the line “To see it, click here.” That link would download a program onto your computer that unlocks the PC to hackers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In my mind I have an image of the Grinch sitting in his icy hovel tapping at his keyboard, that big, diabolical grin spreading across his face.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As if the slutbot didn’t give us enough to worry about, spammers and other net-baddies are ramping up their use of holiday e-cards to distribute malware, according to the Christian Science Monitor. “While malicious e-cards are not a new problem,” says the Monitor, “their numbers have grown, their tactics have improved, and their victims are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1003","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1003","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1003"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1003\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}