|
I BECAME mildly nervous moments after hearing from the other end of
the phone line that I won a weekend suite accommodation in a
Tagaytay hotel. Call me a pessimist, but I did not think that it was
real. That’s how I ignored the call no matter how femininely
alluring the sound of her voice was.
Several days after that, I got an e-mail from a
major bank informing me that there were several unauthorized
attempts to break into my account. Then I asked myself: How do you
attract hackers into my bank account no matter how inconsequential
my savings appeared to be?
It came from a system-generated announcement (no
name and signature required) as it cautioned me against using my
account until after three days.
This made me feel nervous once again.
Is this the price I’ll have to pay (wittingly
or unwittingly) for allowing my name to be commercialized on the
Internet? Check this out. As of yesterday, search opportunities for
the casual name “Rey Elbo” was recorded to be at 55,400 for
Yahoo compared with 26,500 under Google.
Conversely, if you opt to use the formal tag
“Reylito A. H. Elbo” as in this column you’ll get 754 hits for
Yahoo and reasonably 552 for Google.
I don’t have a website or a blog. As far as I
could tell, I am not a tech-savvy person. This made me feel terribly
nervous, especially when I don’t earn money out of this apparent
“popularity” in the web.
Am I naïve? Am I a good target-victim of social
engineering as described by Walter Mossberg in The Wall Street
Journal? I’m not sure.
Social engineering, according to Mossberg, is
“the online equivalent of an old-fashioned con game, in which a
crook frightens people with false warnings, or tempts them with
false promises, and then robs them.”
It’s the equivalent of the time-tested street
fraud like dugo-dugo or laglag-barya in crowded public places and
jeepney manic-like situations here in the Philippines.
Wikipedia reports that it was Kevin Mitnick, a
reformed computer criminal and security consultant who popularized
the term social engineering. As the first social engineer, he points
out that it’s much easier to trick someone into giving you his or
her password for a system than the effort to hack into it.
Social engineering is a major problem for us who
live and work while writing and receiving a lot of e-mail and
browsing sites for research. But life for a consultant-writer like
me, as has been noted, must necessarily go on as long as I’ll be
on my cautious toes.
But the road to the latest technology, even to a
budget-conscious family that I’m in, is terribly tempting to all
kinds that offer something new for a curious cat like me.
That’s why it’s hard to figure out how I
settled this past nine years, two months, three weeks, ten hours and
26 minutes with my old reliable desktop computer still going strong
with its Pentium 4 strength-capacity, even if it’s housed in a
non-air-conditioned room.
“Use it as long as it is working.” It’s a
constant reminder of my wife Bonnie whose personal motto is limited
only to the accompanying old adage–“Buy only what you need!”
This is not to say that she’s right every step
of the way. Au contraire, being a card-carrying member of the female
tribe, Bonnie exudes the confidence of a fancy shopper whenever
she’s in any SM Hypermart outlet, not minding the limit of her
extension credit card.
I’d always say “yes” with Bonnie. I
thought I’ll say “yes” although what I really meant was
“no.” So I ended up mixing myself as I got another important
lesson from the tech-savvy writer like Mossberg.
___
Rey Elbo is a business consultant
specializing in human resources and total quality management as a
fused specialty. Reader’s feedback may be sent to kairoshq@info.com.ph
|
