A cautionary tale. Yesterday a client forwarded me an email that he considered fishy, and asked for my opinion. The email contained an attachment, and so I set out to find out what opening the attachment did.

Now normally I take extra precautions when doing something like that, so that any bad “jujus” contained in suspicious files are not allowed to damage my computer. But I guess I had gotten overconfident with time and so I opened the attachment, with just the normal defenses I have in place, as per my own security model. Nothing seemed to happen, which made me suspicious. Anyways, I analyzed the attachment with a service that scans it against 49 different antivirus programs, and it did turn out to be a malicious file. I got rid of it but missed the fact that it had already delivered its payload and that in turn was now waiting to hack my computer. Ha.

Long story short, when I came to the computer this morning I found evidence that a hack attempt had been performed on my computer, emphasis on attempt. AppGuard had blocked the execution of a password stealer that was going to be used to attempt to steal the passwords stored in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, etc. (not that there are any, I have a standalone password manager and never use the browser’s capability to store passwords for that very reason).

With a chuckle at the clever attempt to hack my computer, I proceeded to scan and clean up any infected files. This was no doubt the closest I had come in years to an actual computer security breach. Mind you, the attempt failed, but only because the last layer in my security model, AppGuard, had stopped the unauthorized run of the password stealer that had been placed in an obscure location in my computer. Which brings me to the point of the story.

If it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone. Except the classic, usual outcome in most cases, if you open the wrong attachment or click on the wrong link, is an infected computer, passwords or other information stolen, and so forth. So when it comes to online related activities, always be alert, always be careful, never let your guard down. Oh, and implement my security model 🙂