SOFTWARE SCAMS ON INTERNET TIME

摘要

Regular readers know that I have become an unwilling connoisseur of junk e-mail. A few weeks ago, I noticed an interesting trend in spam. Amid the promises of hot teenage cuties and the missives from Africa offering riches in return for a small good-faith investment was a stream of superficially legitimate-looking ads for Norton SystemWorks 2002 and other software from Symantec. A quick investigation of these messages and of the Web sites they linked to established that they had no direct connection to Symantec, even when the sender's address on the mail indicated otherwise. Probing deeper, I gained a new perspective on the strange, dark side of e-commerce and uncovered some online traps awaiting the unwary.