(Headquarters of Yandex, 16, Leo Tolstoy St., Moscow 119021, the internet browser and service provider that controls 60% of the Russian market).
We got a chance to have some grand fun at Jim’s expense last night. It wasn’t his fault, not in the slightest. As you may have gathered, Jim is a Luddite, and clings not to his guns and religion, but to his America On Line account. Like me.
There are a variety of reasons for us to do so. Address lists like the ones I use to bombard you with this trivia. I had pause last year, when hackers in Russia broke into the servers at AOL and Yahoo, and stole the contact lists of millions of subscribers.
That included me, and it has been a periodic irritation as persons unknown sent really clumsy notes purporting to be from my account saying dumb stuff like: “Hi! This is really cool. Click on the link!”
Doing so would then load something nasty on your computer. It is really sick, and it wasn’t our fault- it was the IT security teams at AOL and Yahoo. I am clean, at the moment (I think) and run my MacKeeper anti-virus program. I used to feel secure behind the once-invulnerable Apple operating system, since we felt ourselves above the reach of the hacker slim-balls. We Mac users always had a sense of moral superiority to those serfs of Bill Gates at Microsoft, but of course those days are long gone.
Anyway, just a reminder: if I sent you a note, it is not going to contain just a impersonal plea to click on a hyperlink.
To the best of my knowledge, neither company has owned up to their colossal security failure, not that it will get my address book back. Or Jim’s.
Yesterday had an interesting wrinkle. Jim does not normally communicate via email, though it has been known to happen. When I saw the note from him in the queue, I skipped down through the ads for ammunition and the new political scandals of the day and clicked it open to see what was going on.
It wasn’t addressed to me personally, but it was a nice note.
I really hope you get this fast.
I could not inform anyone about our trip, because it was impromptu. We had to be in Philippines for a Tour. The program was successful, but our journey has turned sour. We misplaced our wallets and cell phones on our way back to the hotel after we went for sightseeing.
The wallet contains all the valuables we have. Now, our luggage is in custody of the hotel management pending when we make payment.
I am sorry if I am inconveniencing you, but I have only very few people to turn to now. I will be very grateful if I can get a short-term loan of ($2,450) from you. This will enable me sort our hotel bills out and get my sorry self back home.
I will really appreciate whatever you can afford at this moment. I promise to refund it in full as soon as I return. Please let me know if you can be of any assistance.
Thanks
Jim
I laughed out loud. I had kissed Chanteuse Mary on the cheek at the end of my participation in the Hurricane party at Willow, and tried to imagine how they could have arrived in Manila in time for the misadventure.
The Concorde fleet is long out of service, so no supersonic commercial travel was possible. Perhaps a B-1 jet out of Andrews? That would be big enough for Jim to stretch out a little bit en route. If they had been joined by in-flight refueling KC-135s out of Hickam and Kadena, it might have been possible, though I don’t know about landing rights for bombers at Ninoy Aquino International Airport in the Philippines.
After my little laugh, I hit “Forward” and sent a note to Jim, saying I had sent the money in care of the Manila Hotel, which is the sort of luxury Jim would prefer on his whirlwind trip to the Orient. Then I mashed the button to send it as the phone began to chirp at me. It was Jon-without, who had received a copy of the same earnest solicitation.
He wanted to screw with the hackers. I was curious how he did it- the return address appeared to be Jim’s actual AOL address.
Jon had gone a step further- he had actually responded to the note, and when he did so, the address changed to Jim’s actual user name, but with the “@” suffix changed from AOL to a thing called @yandex.com.
The fake Jim’s response to Jon yielded a set of instructions to use Western Union, and a list of preferred addresses to send the cash. Jon proposed sending a response, indicating he had complied, but sent the money to the Western Union office furthest from Manila to inconvenience the thief.
I cautioned him that responding was only going to make the hackers know that his own email was valid, and might in turn make him a target.
We agreed it was funny, and as we ended the conversation I got another call. It was from Jim himself, and I told him the connection was good, considering he was so far away. He growled at me, and said he was getting calls from all over, and what is more, the hackers had taken control of his account, changed the password and he couldn’t get it.
“I called AOL and they told me it would be twenty-five minutes to talk to someone alive and I just hung up. Bastards.”
“That is interesting that they actually now appear to be you. But Jon-without told me responding to the note actually changes the address to a non-AOL server.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
I told him I would poke around and see what I could find, and would see him at Willow later, assuming the supersonic jet could get him and Mary back from Asia in time.
Real Jim told me to do something improbable to myself and I told him I would try, once I checked something out. I thought the whole thing was pretty clever on the part of the hackers. I looked at the new return address and did a little forensic analysis.
Turns out “ Yandex” is a full-service free email system, based in, yeah, I know, here is a big surprise: “ Russia Ukraine Belarus Kazakhstan and Turkey.” They claim their mission is to “help people discover new opportunities in their lives.” The site offered me the opportunity to click on a link and download the browser, since the Yandex folks promised me that “ The internet can no longer be seen as separate from the reality surrounding us, and search engines now have to look for all kinds of things, not just online but all over the offline world as well. And they don’t just look for things and find them – they also give helpful suggestions in any real-life situation.”
I am not kidding you. I backed out of that site as fast as I could click- but I realized that the Yandex server now had my IP address just by looking, and it could make me a target. The hacker who calls himself Guccifer (real name Marcel Lazăr Lehel) is a Romanian who successfully nailed Colin Powell’s personal AOL account, and got to former President George W. Bush’s personal email as well.
So, I shut down my computer. Then I looked out the window at the remaining ice.
Then I thought that Hillary might have been onto something, using her own private network for all that Government business- except, maybe she was also sharing the Department of State’s private business for four full years with Yandex.
I mean, after all, they give helpful suggestions in all sorts of real-life situations. It must be true. They say so right on the internet.
Copyright 2015 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303