I’ve known for a while that criminals had moved into extortion for their nasty cyber games. Today, though, I got my first extortion e-mail. It had all the grace and cunning of your average Nigerian scam letter, but with humorous mis-spellings and grammar manglings thrown in for flavor. It read:

hello friend

    first,i am sorry i am not a good man,I am a computer hacker,so when you seeing this email,your computer Already infected my virus.

    i want nothing,i just want a few money,so you must send 150 US dollar to my e-gold  (http://www.e-gold.com) account.

    if you dont do this, I will activate my virus in a week, then your computer will be able to be paralysed and to appear the pornographic procedure.

    this is not a joke,think about it.

    check this link to send money to me:   http://XXXXXXXXX.com

    i just can only wait you 5 days

          when you send money to me,call me at: jznglskq@gmail.com

              see you very soon

I’ve redacted the link to send money, but I’ve left the poor schmuck’s e-mail address. This sort of e-mail should forever put to rest the “all computer criminals are geniuses” meme. Needless to say, there was no malicious payload (unless you count bad grammar), and no one should ever respond to something like this.

I have left a message for the eGold security team–it should be interesting to see if they get back in touch with me. If they do, I’ll let you know.

Categories: Security, Threats