Dulcinea said:
People fall for this stuff? I thought it was all pretty obviously malarkey.
Well, understand that this is one of the problems with bringing the lowest human denominator onto The Internet and getting them involved with telecommunications. You wind up with millions and millions of people who are lucky to remember how to breathe properly able to operate these increasingly simplistic systems. simplistic systems which by their nature are easy to operate.
Tricking your average computer user nowadays is very much similar to poisoning a retard by offering free candy you injected with something: it's not hard, and a paticularly apt analogy given the very nature of the people who have made games like "Farmville" massive successes and capapulted companies like Zynga into massive business success.
Sorry if that's insulting to some people reading this, but there is no nice way of saying that the internet in recent years has been intentionally packed full of morons, specifically because they could be exploited through the internet by businesses. It's not surprising that just as the sheeple can be sheered and exploited easily by business, that hackers can do the same exact thing, oftentimes using the same exact methods. I mean when you look at all the people that play "Farmville" and the social networking/money making power of Facebook, is it any surprise that hackers use similar techniques? What's more things like that prime the sheep for exploitation because they expect "free" games and offers, but just as those free games actually exist to addict people and goad them into paying money, not really being free, the other offers by hackers pay off by inserting backdoors, password hacks, keyloggers, and general "for the lulz" malware onto systems. It's like shooting ducks in a barrel.
I'm admittedly not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I'm pretty aware of this stuff, and take precautions. I don't jump on obvious bait. I also don't get involved with piracy not *only* because it's wrong, but because by pirating crap your trusting an anonymous, obviously immortal (by being a pirate) source to install stuff on your computer. You steal a game, and your basically trusting "Cap'N 1337 Haxx" to not be doing anything else to your computer when you download and install it. People will sit down and say they trust this group, or that group, but even if certain hacker groups WERE trustworthy to their users, nothing really stops some joker from using that name. Even if the real group complains, how do you know who the source to trust when everyone is anonymous?
That said, even I pull tons of crap off my computer from time to time, using things like Norton (and no, I do not think Norton makes you invulnerable, unlike a certain internet Meme, and there are a lot of things it won't pick up. Still what it does pick up can be crazy at times, especially seeing as even legitimate sites like Amazon.com load your system with tracking cookies and garbage which they shouldn't be doing anyway, but which complicates matters).
The point here being that The Internet is no longer a haven for the fairly intelligent, at one time it took a degree of knowlege or at least patience just to get online and use The Internet. This is to say nothing of the BBS systems and Echos that dominated casual use for a long time and required programs like Procomm (or the Simterm knockoff) and similar things just to connect. It shouldn't shock anyone that by dumbing it down and herding in the people they dumbed it down for, that there is mass victimization going on.
The ironic thing is that the hackers are pretty much using the same basic techniques the businesses are.