ck's archive: the users are back

The influx is always rough. Students parking in the new garage, legally or not, don't seem to know that there are separate floors for students and staff, and have interrupted my routine.

On the computing front, it's no better. For the last few years, the beginning of the school year has been marked by the release of new email worms. I guess the prospect of tens of thousands of computers that are a few weeks behind on patching being plugged in is pretty tempting to virus writers.

Despite information technologists' best efforts, the social engineering exploits are still running strong. As part of my job, I get copied on email sent to the software that runs uiuc's email routing infrastructure; these showed up in my email this morning:

From: <censored>
To: Post Office <MAILER-DAEMON@uiuc.edu>
Subject: Re: Returned mail: see transcript for details

I don't understand what instructions I should follow. Please be more
explicit.

<censored>

Post Office wrote:

>Dear user <censored>,
>
>Your email account has been used to send a large amount of unsolicited
>e-mail during this week.
>
>Please follow the instructions in order to keep your computer safe.
>
>Have a nice day,
>uiuc.edu support team.
>
>

From: <censored, but same as above>
To: Automatic Email Delivery Software <MAILER-DAEMON@uiuc.edu>
Subject: Re: status

I am unable to open the attached file.

<censored>

Automatic Email Delivery Software wrote:

>Once you have completed the form in the attached file , your account
>records will not be interrupted and will continue as normal.
>