Susan is a waitress at a local restaurant. She is also a college student and lives on the west coast far away from her parents and friends. Susan comes from an area which is permeated by folklore and superstition having a heritage of gypsies. She doesn’t hear from her friends and relatives much so she frequently exchanges email with them to keep abreast of current affairs in her hometown. Occasionally they send her a joke or something funny in the email and she enjoys this. She hasn’t been on a computer long and is just now having these experiences with email which she thinks is wonderful. Today she receives a chain letter in her email. The change letter says that if she does not forward the email to everyone on her mailing list a curse will be brought upon her and her entire family which will cause calamity to befall them.
The email is from voodoo@cybercurse .com. She remembers a colleague who had received on of these emails at one time and was hit by a car the next day. Fearing her very life she forwards this email to everyone on her mailing list adding that her colleague was killed three days ago after receiving this email. Susan warns the others that they to must forward this email to avoid this grimacing curse. What Susan does not know is that the original author of this email composed this knowing that multitudes of people just like her would forward this email to others .The author also knew that she along with many other users did not know about the (BCC) blind carbon copy feature of their email software. Before long the author gets replies back and has harvested thousands of email addresses which he will sell and make a profit from. Three weeks later Susan starts getting multitudes of email from companies and individuals she has never met or heard from. Susan is also getting pornographic emails that she never requested. Little did she know that one of the people who received that email was a sixteen year old male who thought it would be funny to take all these email addresses that he got in that forwarded email and go to pornographic sites and enter Susan’s email address into fields so that he could view free pornography.
What happened to Susan happens to many all over the world every day because they do not know how to properly secure themselves. Whether it is from ignorance or laziness, or perhaps a limited time factor many like Susan suffer the consequences that she did on a daily basis all over the world. Nine out of ten people average computer users that I interviewed did not even know what a blind carbon copy was. I also did a study of mail forwarded to me and found that the majority of mail forwarded that contained list of others addresses were AOL addresses. This may indicate a need for AOL to educate users on email and netiquette. These chain letters may be effective because of people’s beliefs in superstitions also. Thus this type of exploit may be considered a form of social engineering.
Corporations are also beginning to realize the dangers that email can impose. They can be held liable for inappropriate use of email by their employees. The following is taken from
Technology, Media and Telecommunications The hidden legal dangers of email | A review of best practices a Nabarro Nathanson publication.” Copyright Under the Copyright Designs and PatentsAct 1988 (CDPA), a party can infringe a copyright work by making an electronic copy and making a “transient” copy (which occurs when sending an email).Under the CDPA an employer will not only be vicariously liable if its employee has undertaken any such unauthorized copying, it may also be liable as a” distributor” of such unauthorized materials. Copyright infringement is now very common, as more and more people forward text, graphics, audio and video clips by way of their company’s email system.
Employees must therefore be warned that the copying of a third party work without consent will in most cases constitute copyright infringement and therefore such unauthorized copying is prohibited. “(Ellacott)[1]
The publication also stated this,” Pornography in June 2001, Sextracker, a porn watcher, stated that 70% of pornography downloaded from the internet was downloaded in the office environment. Such downloading will give rise to criminal liability under the Obscene Publications Act 1959. Employers would therefore do well to prohibit such activities and take action if such activities occur:
•Merrill Lynch sacked 15 traders after they were caught circulating
Pornography;
• Compaq is reported to have dismissed 20 employees for the distribution of pornographic images which they had downloaded from the internet.
It is of course very important that employees are fully aware that such activities could give rise to immediate dismissal.”(Ellacott)[2]
This further shows us the dangers of forwarded email as corporations may be held liable for email that is inappropriate or illegal in nature. We can easily see why corporations have very strict security policies regarding email usage from this. The friendly forwarded email may leave them with legal issues that can be very costly and undesirable.
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