“Security vendor Marshal is warning email users of a new mass targeted spam outbreak which contains a personalised subject line claiming to have caught ‘you’ naked on video. The malicious campaign is being sent from the Srizbi botnet identified as the largest spam-sending botnet on the Internet and responsible for 45 percent of all spam caught, according to Marshal’s TRACE Team. The message itself contains a clickable link which claims to be a naked video of the recipient and reads: ‘we caught you naked [your name]! check the video.’ When the user clicks on the link, the PC becomes infected and enlisted as a member of the Srizbi botnet. ‘The spammers are clearly hoping to shock unsuspecting recipients into investigating this compromising footage. In their haste to look into the claim, some people might not consider the message is malware,’ explained Bradley Anstis, vice-president of products at Marshal. ‘It’s a simple but clever form of social engineering. It is not a new trick by spammers, but it is proven to get your attention.’” — Secure Computing (Australia)

Spam is to the internet what venereal disease is to promiscuity. At best it’s an annoyance and at worst it’s a danger that simply comes with the territory. And like disease, it is controllable in isolated cases but impossible to purge from the system as a whole. It’s like syphilis — just when you think you’ve managed to penicillin it out of existence, it starts to make a comeback.

As diseases mutate and evolve, so too does spam. The Srizbi botnet now blares that it has “caught you naked.” Incredibly, this will cause a percent or two of recipients to open the mail — and when there are billions of recipients, one percent is enough. The curious thing about this bit of “social engineering” is that people will (a) believe they could have been videotaped nude; (b) care that they’ve been videotaped nude. In the first case, you have to be pretty casual with your body to end up on somebody’s camera. In the second case, what’s the big fucking deal? Everyone has a body. Everyone gets naked. Is it really so frightening to think that somewhere in the world there is a video of your paunch or your ass? It should be more frightening to realize the number of surveillance cameras that have recorded your face. After all, an ass is an ass is an ass, but the face is unique, the neon sign of identity. That’s why mugshots exclude everything from the neck down.

It’s interesting to look at the recent fad for naked vlogging on YouTube in this light. It consists of vloggers (the video equivalent of bloggers) taping a message in the buff and posting it to YouTube. Usually these messages show the vloggers’ faces but not their “private” parts. What’s weird is that, from a certain perspective, their real nakedness consists in the fact that they’re already showing their faces, not to mention sometimes bearing their souls as well. Once you have the courage to do that, is it really such a big deal to expose a little cleavage or a hairy chest?

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