The cheque's in the mail

Note: This article first appeared over at our affiliates site http://www.alphaque.com. The original article can be found here.

By: Dinesh Nair

phrase heard so often, and so often disbelieved. Who really trusts a lamer who claims the cheque's in the mail, thinking you would believe so obvious a time-buying argument. Not too many people, I would presume. Which means that it would have been a big surprise for Microsoft Licensing in Reno, Nevada to actually have a cheque they sent out come back Return to Sender, along with some additional payload. Payload which contained some good old-fashioned porn, soaked in a substance which has since been tested positive for anthrax.

This incident wasnt the first in a bunch of anthrax-bearing snail mail which has hit America over the last week. Prominent personalities including NBC anchor Tom Brokaw and the Senate Majority Leader have been recepients of anthrax mail. Americans are being warned to be wary of unknown and unsolicited mail, to be sure that they know the sender of any snail mail before opening it and to just quarantine anything which they find suspicious.

Pretty good advice, but then this is nothing new, is it ? The security community has been giving the same advice for email for as long as I can remember. Virii transmitted thru email is not new, and has a longer history than its meatspace cousin. Undoubtedly, virii in snail mail is much more deadly and can cause loss far greater than having your PC thrashed or having your confidential documents mailed out without your knowledge.

There is some irony involved in seeing the same advice being given to regular postal mail, that last bastion and competitor to total adoption of email planetwide. The fundamentalists state that email could never replace the personal touch of a handwritten letter, and could never embody the experience in receiving one. They got that right ! Today, with the unknown factors involved in these alarming turn of events, all snail mail is suspect. Not only could potential purveyors of terror use it as a transport mechanism for their deadly payloads, a whole bunch of kooks are emerging from the woodwork perpetrating me-too mailings and hoaxes. Who knows what the next envelope the postman drops of will contain ?

And this, I predict, will signal a shift into a much wider adoption of email. Email would now be a very attractive means of getting in touch among segments of the population which have resisted it today. It is comparatively much safer than receiving a tainted letter and the worst that could happen would not harm human life. The naysayers of email's strengths would humbly forget their objections and start whipping out long hidden Email for Dummies books, rereading and refamiliarising themselves with something they thought they'd never use. Email traffic on ISPs and corporate networks would see a gradual increase over the next few weeks, and if all things go well, hopefully stay that way.

Sure, going electronic puts you at risk of receiving computer virii and loads more unsolicited commercial email than you would thru snail mail. But these are as easily dismissed with the delete key and just as easily prevented with incoming mail filters. Email address mangling when posting to public newsgroups and forums would also prevent you from being harvested into spam address databases. Adopting a good virus scanner and keeping its signature databases up to date helps in reducing your risk from unwanted payloads. It is far easier to protect against computer virii than it is against deadly diseases sent thru the postal system. The capability to prevent computer virus infection is widely available and not subject to lack of supply, as the vaccines for some biological terrors are.

Let us cut this terror in half, and save ourselves a whole lot of unnecessary worry. Increase our adoption of email, and push our legislators to accept this medium of communication as legally accepted tender. We need to adopt models which do not hold us hostage to the next guy with a grudge against our government and our nation. Whatever said and done, the protection of human life is paramount over the risk email poses to our information infrastructure.

Start using email today, much more often than you already are. Its safer, in the scary world we live in.

1.) Editorial Response to Microsoft - madirish
2.) WCG Malaysia: A Quaker's POV - biatch0
3.) Class Action Lawsuits for software: Why Apple would win - DietCoke
4.) The cheque's in the mail - Dinesh Nair
5.) CounterStrike 1.3 - A complete failure - DietCoke
6.) When Does Gaming Become Unhealthy? - Archfiend