I was talking to Ian Ybarra the other day and realized that, although my days and weeks are largely planned out, what about the long term planning? Sure, I can prioritize the little tasks but what about the big picture? Do I know what it is I
Phishers aren’t stupid, they’ve got a pretty good thing going for them: free money. I think we’re all familiar with how phishing works. Someone sends out hundreds of thousands, if not millions of emails to people posing as a bank, eBay, PayPal, King of Zimbabwe, etc.
Even if .0001% of the people who get these emails fall for them that’s a pretty huge return. It doesn’t cost much to send an email, right? But, as I mentioned the emails are pretty much a shot in the dark. A random email to a random person from a seemingly trusting but often unfamiliar source. Most of us know we don’t have an account with Bank of America, right? I obviously won’t even open those emails. So, how do you increase the odds of people opening their emails?
What if we made a script that scrapes people’s social networking sites and learns about them? Kevin over at WIRED made a script that finds sexual predators on MySpace. Couldn’t we make one that gathered everyone’s top friends and then sent an email posed as them? I’d certainly open an email addressed from someone in my ‘top 8’. Wouldn’t you? Think about something as simple as the following:
hey man sorry i havent emailed u in a while. anyway i want to buy this stuff on amazon but it sux because it doesnt take my cc. could you send me your number and ill hit you back later?? you no im good for it. anyway holla at ya later.
Obviously a lot of damage could be done if someone grabbed their card and hit reply. I’d certainly think about helping a friend like that. Maybe not via email but some people (obviously) don’t know better.
What if someone is listed with a college education and a high income? You could use some different cases like:
Hey Jon, I was looking to get a present for my Mom but since I’m switching banks my card doesn’t work. Would you mind lending me your information? It’s only $24.99 + shipping and I can just write you a check. Would you mind? I’d really appreciate it, man. Take it easy, Mark.
Those are some emails that I imagine people would stop and think about. “Hey, it’s from Mark, of course I trust him”. Trust is powerful. Make a program that can manipulate it and I think your odds of successfully scamming people will greatly increase.
Besides, think of how popular you’d become. CNN would label you something clever like the ‘MySpace Scammer’. You’d be uber popular!
Anyway, whoever decides to do this, let me know and we can split the earnings up accordingly.
Update: Seth Godin writes about people who attempt this kind of manipulation and the power of trust, as well.
Update 2: A recent ‘social phishing’ study confirms the powerful notion I explored here..
Exciting news for b5media and 9rules. I’ll be chastised for putting the two companies in the same sentence but that’s alright. b5media, one of my employers, raised $2 million in VC funding. 9rules, some of my best internet pals, has received some tasty cookies for all their great work. I don’t know which of these two rewards took more work…
The Oreo CEO himself has tagged me with a meme. I like this one becuase you can tell a lot by a person’s music.
With that said, here are 7 random songs from my collection…
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Not everything I do online ends up here on my blog so I figured I’d point to an article I wrote on Women and Minority Entrepreneurs, resting on your laurels, priorities, and whether entrepreneurship can be taught. Additionally I’ve started a project documenting myself on video every day for 60 seconds. I’m on day five over at Mind Averse.
Hey Facebook fans, are you really friends with your “friends”? If not why the heck do you have them listed as one? In any case, test your true friend knowledge with the Facebook Friend Game. Found under ‘My Friends’ as a tab at the top. I’m kinda bad at this!
Disclaimer: I actually dreamt this blog entry. The concept and the act of writing it. It was weird. Gas is coming back down! Neat. The cheapest gas I ever find is at Safeway. I paid $2.81 last week and it’s $2.60 this week. Wow, that’s such a remarkable difference. So? We look at gas prices move up and down and we feel like we’re beating “the man” if we go find the cheapest gas station n the metro area. But think about it. For simplicity sake, 20 cents saved on a 10-gallon tank means I paid two dollars less to fill up my car. Hooray! Wait, two bucks? And this is an extreme example; I doubt you’ll find better savings more than occasionally. So why do we still comparison-shop for gas? Spending the time and energy driving to the cheaper station now seems irrational. Economically speaking, if my time is worth $15/hour and I spend more than an extra three minutes going to a cheaper station I just cost myself more than I saved. Hmm, thank goodness Safeway is just across the street…
I’d like to quickly talk about the idealization going on with the internet. These last few days (or maybe a week or two?) away from my own website have helped me realize something oh-so important…
Hi Ford, take note: Jeep has done an infinately better job of marketing to students. This Facebook group is so simple. Nicely done.