I've investigated a half dozen or so of these. It has been going on for a while; the first one I saw was about a year ago.

Some of the common characteristics:

They know the names, email addresses, and nicknames of the CEO, and the Treasurer and/or Controller.

They address the Controller by name, a little bit of social pleasantries, and often say what account the "expenditure" should be coded to. The first contact is pleasant, but says it's urgent, and needs to be done right away. Subsequent emails get progresively more demanding.

Early ones asked for the wire transfer to go to a bank in Shanghai, Singapore, or something. More recent ones are transfers to an indivdual's account in a U.S. bank. (Doubtless belonging to some poor gullible person who answered one of those "Well Paid Part Time Job Working From Home as a Financial Agent" spams.)

Registering a .co domain to spoof a .com is popular, as are various other typosquatting tricks. Some cheapskate crooks just use a hotmail-type Reply-To, though.

If the victim sends the money, another request will follow. Then another, and another, as long as they'll keep doing it.

From last September: http://blog.barracuda.com/2014...

That's what I do for my password manager password. I use German capitalization rules (all nouns are capitalized, not just proper nouns) and numeric and special characters where appropriate. Then I have a particular obscure quote which I remember in slightly misquoted form.

For example (NOT the one I really use of course!) "Four Score and Seven Years ago, some Mothers brought forth upon this Continent a new Nation" would be "4S&7Ya,sMb4thutCanN"

The CO2 problem can not be solved by the denial of arithmetic.

But oh, no, it can't possibly be that China's fast-track of building new nuclear power plants had anything whatsoever to do with it, oh no, never never never never. (grumble grumble grumble)

The CO2 problem will never be solved until the people who continue to loudly assert that they are so very very concerned about it get over their irrational dread of the only 24x7 source of energy that has the capacity to compete with coal.

OK, I think all of us (or, most of us, anyway) are clear on the "It's just distilled water, and doesn't do anything that distilled water doesn't do" thing, but one thing has always bugged me.

How come the homeopathy people always discuss the components that aren't in their nostrums using Harry Potter Latin? They just stick a "um" or "ium" on the end of everything

(Actually Rowling's Latin was better than this...

It massively ticks me off. If the people who are most visibly going on and on about global warming believed it themselves, they'd be front and center advocating replacing coal with nuclear. (Which we ought to have been doing for the past 40 years for more reasons than just CO2.) Instead, all we get from the vast majority is arithmetic denialism.

"Melancholy Elephants" is a very important perspective on this issue.

CitizenYouAreIllegallyParkedYouHaveThirtySecondsToMoveYourCar

Fortunately, that was a couple of weeks ago, when I wanted to download LibreOffice. I recalled from the last time that "utorrent is the thing". Back then, it didn't do ads. I would have left it installed to re-seed LibreOffice, but it didn't take much getting pelted with "Hottttt Roooskie wimmin are lusting after U" ads for me to remove it, with prejudice.

>Are people living in the Chernobyl area? No? THAT is my point.

Actually, a few people are living in the Chernobyl area. Some of the old folks didn't evacuate, and some of them moved back.

Interestingly, the people who moved back to Chernobyl and Pripyat are doing better, health and longevity wise, than the people who stayed away.

I wonder if the point wasn't to steal the Mt. Gox Bitcoins, but just to delete them, forever removing them from the system, like the several million dollars worth on that hard drive buried in a landfill somewhere. By removing a bunch from the system, it reduces the supply and raises the price for those who are holding lots of them.

(Fans of 1960s James Bond movies might recall that this was Auric Goldfinger's reason for setting off a nuke in Fort Knox.)

"The Puppet Masters" was actually pretty decent, given their limitations. (They ran out of budget to do decent alien spaceships, and they're obviously not going to be able to take it as far as Schedule Suntan without getting a kiss-of-death NC-17 rating.) Donald Sutherland absolutely nailed the rold of The Old Man. And how did they get that chimp to act so *creepy* when hag-ridden? Much of the dialog was straight from the book, and a number of scenes were very close to the book, modulo moving the setting to the present day from a future where there are Venus colonies. It was made by people who read and loved the book.

Heh... some of this reminds me of some of the goings-on in the "Freefall" online comic strip. Among all the slapstick humor is a good bit of serious discussion about what personhood really means, and when does an AI (either electromechanical, or biological) have it.

One of the characters has been introducing the robots to religions... plural. All of them.

Never mind... firefox -new-tab www.mozilla.org apparently works like firefox -remote "openURL(www.mozilla.org, new-tab)" used to. (At least, for my use case.)

Dang. I use this a lot.

Crap. Crapity crapity crapity crap.