I got a distressing email from a friend earlier this evening. He wrote of picking up a trojan on his personal laptop. It was asking for money to undo the shenanigans. And my friend was asking for advice before he reformatted and reinstalled.
First thing I did, like any of you would do, was upload some useful tools to one of my servers for him. But now I’m sitting here thinking…
We all send attachments back and forth in email and there are certain people that you trust. Instead of the trash, instead of treading carefully, the automatic trust thing (and the all-too-human trait of being in too much of a hurry) makes us open, run, visit or whatever.
Perhaps that trust is misguided. My friend’s one of the folks I trusted that way. But as I write I’m running checks on his recent attachments!
Will his box be clean tonight? Tomorrow? Next week? What will he do, what will he run before sending something else? Multiply the risk by the number of people with ‘trusted’ status.
I feel like I dodged a bullet.
As it happens I’ll be seeing my friend tomorrow. This will certainly be one topic of conversation.
