Norton Anti-virus fail

Of course the big, scary monster in the room right now, at least as far as the Internet is concerned, is the Heartbleed bug.  This is not a good thing.  From what I've been reading it's everywhere and large numbers of computers have been infected, or were infected at one point in time.  It hasn't really effected me.  I do all my banking on line and which means I'm in my bank's website a lot.  They were right on top of the situation, as was the credit card company I have my Visa through.  This does not mean I need to let my guard down, however.  About three weeks ago I received an email from L. B. Smith Ford, a local car dealer, thanking me for having my 2005 Ford Focus serviced and requesting me to participate in an online survey.  Well, I don't drive a Ford Focus, I drive a 2013 Honda CR-V so I knew this was one of those ho-ho phishing things, which may or may not have been connected to the Heartbleed bug.  There are a lot of people out there who would have clicked on the link to rectify this problem with L.B. Smith, not me, I just deleted the email.

This morning I received an email from Norton Security about the aforementioned bug which I thought was interesting.  They detailed how it work to insidiously steal your information.  It talked about phishing emails and how official they looked and to avoid clicking on links.  This was nice, but odd because two paragraphs later there was a link I was supposed to click on to get more information.  And then there was another link I could click to make sure my system was fully updated so I could be worry free.  This sounds really good... except didn't they just tell me how phishing works, how the emails look so official and I should never click on links?  Duh!

Phishing for stupidity

When did Norton start hiring Jello Heads?  In my opinion this is pretty much a super fail if the email was truly from Norton.  If it was a shitty attempt at phishing it was pretty damn shrewd.  There are a lot of people out there who subscribe to Norton.  I can see hundreds of people clicking on that link to see if their computer was safe.  I can see them signing in with their password.  DUH!  With all the stuff on the Internet about how bad this Heartbleed is, people want to alleviate all of their concerns, they want to be worry free.  This is why they have an Anti-virus installed in the first place.  So, if this was truly a legitimate email from Norton they should not have provided links, rather they should have just told their subscribers to go to the website using the link every one of them has on their desktop.  Of course this world is full of stupid people and I wouldn't be surprised if some of them work for Norton,c