It’s 8:30am. You stumble into work half asleep and slouch at your desk. You boot up your computer.. tick tick tick. It runs its system diagnostics and you see the Windows logo lurch into view.

Umpteen programs (half of which you’ve forgotten what they do) start up in your system tray, and you automatically click on your email inbox. More whirring, wheezing and hissing..

Slowly your inbox comes into view and you find an email, from a young woman called Emily.

Subject: nake pics as you've requested

Message body:
I am hungry for sex. If you feel the same then take a look at my picture I am attaching to this email and reply back so we could hook up.

Attached file: pic.scr

Suddenly you perk up! Bonjour!

It’s a trick as old as time, of course. Unsolicited emails, arriving out of the blue, offering you pictures of the sender’s naked wife, a nude picture of Jennifer Lopez or a school sweetheart with pigtails, but really delivering a sting in the tail.

In this latest case, the attachment carries a Trojan horse – Troj/FakeAV-IU – which attempts to scare you into buying a fake anti-virus product.

Come on guys, it’s 2011. We should all be smart enough not to fall for tricks like this anymore. You should always be asking yourself why is someone sending this to me? Do I seriously imagine that a complete stranger is going to seek me out as a sexual partner over the internet, sending me photos of herself naked, despite never having communicated with me before?

Computer technology is becoming more sophisticated all the time, but it seems that their users are still neanderthals when it comes to being duped by simple social engineering tricks like the promise of naked pictures.

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