Monday night

I forgot to mention that I received a "phishing" email the other day from someone purporting to be Bank of America, with Bank of America's logo on it. I was suspicious the minute I saw the subject line in Outlook Express--"NOTICE !"--all caps with a space before the exclamation point.

Here's a screen shot of the email:

Note that it reads Bank of America "member" instead of "customer." The typeface is also "dirty" and the rest of the language and punctuation klutzy. Also, when you place the cursor over the "NOTICE !" at the bottom of the screen, you get a screen tip that says "Cyrillic," which is the name of the Russian alphabet. So this thing came from Russia.

Last night I saw a segment on "60 Minutes" about computer viruses, worms, etc. I was surprised to find out that most of (or a lot of) this activity originates in Russia and is being carried out by minors! They even had photos of successful hackers. The report said that the some people in Russia regard them as heroes and that their stories appear in the press (with photos).