Software utilities

You know those guys that got arrested the other day for breaking into a woman’s apartment and stealing her MacBook (and other stuff)? You know, the ones who got ‘caught on camera’ (quite literally)?

Well, what those guys did seems to pale right into the background when compared to hackers who seem to be capitalising on the recent China disaster.

There’s an email going round the Internet with a Word document attached to it. The body of the email reads:

BEIJING, May 20 (Xinhua) — The death toll from the earthquake in southwest China’s Sichuan Province has risen to 34,074 nationwide as of 2 p.m. Saturday, while 198,347 people were injured, according to the Information Office of the State Council. Pay attention to attachment for more.

Whatever you do, DO NOT OPEN THE ATTACHED WORD DOCUMENT as it’s infected with a Trojan virus (MalDoc-Fam Trojan).

Opening the attachment downloads the trojan onto your computer and if you have a vulnerable Windows PC, then you’re kinda f*cked as that’s its favourite food of choice.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the first (and it unfortunately won’t be the last) time hackers get up to no good – they did the same thing when the July the 7th bombings happened in London and when Hurricane Katrina came. I bet they’re just rubbing their hands and brains with glee waiting for the next disaster to come hurtling (hurting) along. I wonder what makes someone do something like that – what are they hoping to achieve? To think there are probably circles out there where it’s cool to do stuff like that, where there are rule books and 10-point guidelines to follow to be ‘in with the hacker clique’.

I wish them well.

Really.

Once Karma’s had its wicked way with them, that is.