Fake Obama News

An article that caught my attention this morning by Brian Prince of eWeek (http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Malicious-Sites-With-Fake-Obama-News-Trying-to-Build-Botnet/) details the latest in e-mail security attacks:

“Spammers are luring victims to a malicious site with false reports by President-elect Barack Obama. The spam is being sent out by the Waledac botnet, which security researchers say is a reincarnation of the infamous Storm botnet.”

These types of attacks are bound to increase until people realize, once and for all, that unauthenticated e-mail = unsafe e-mail. I feel badly for people that are falling victim to these sorts of attacks, however, the bad guys will continue to exploit the instant gratification mentality so prevalent today that causes people to open/read e-mails before they look to see from whom they are sent. Under no circumstances should anyone ever open an email from an un-authenticated sender. Until organizations and service providers, large and small, realize this fact and implement systems to enforce true person-to-person e-mail authentications we should expect to read an ever increasing number of stories much like this one.