"The Genre of Scams"
Gordon ByrdGordon Byrd is a rhetorically conscious writer with a long career of reading/writing emails. Periodically, he writes articles for magazines as a hobby. Currently, he is enrolled as a doctoral student in ECU's Rhetoric, Writing, and Technical Communication program. Contents |
ConclusionUsing this attempted scam as the basis and the analysis as a further development of the genre of scam email, I will attempt to define a theory of scam emails. One clear characteristic is that this genre mimics the genres of other, legitimate forms of communication and uses the authority that accompanies everyday emails to convey authority and uptake for the scam as well. The ability to mimic the legitimate email genre is the measure of the effectiveness of a scam email. The same could be said for malware, spyware, etc. These nefarious forms of software attempt to mimic other legitimate, useful background programs that run to serve the primary user, rather than an anonymous third party. Also similar to these other forms of cyber-attacks is the scam email's use of appeals. In the scam email analysis, the appeal was using ethos through an attempt at establishing legitimacy and urgency. Legitimacy should be established by the familiarity of email addresses from known colleagues, correctly used subject lines, well-written English, signature lines with the sender name and recognizable credentials, to name a few features. The request and appeal also build legitimacy. If the request is within the bounds of the typically received and answered emails, then nothing out of the ordinary is detected. When the request is directly against the protocol, legitimacy is lost. Urgency is necessary to make the attack effective, even more so when legitimacy is lost. The more legitimate and urgent the message, the more likely the uptake, because the victim is unlikely to question the request when they need to respond with the requested action or information. If the message conveys urgency well, then most people would look past a few misspelled words or suspicious signature lines. The scam preys on people's desire to help out the requestor, a supposed coworker. How could they delay and tell the sender, “I thought your email was a scam because your grammar was atrocious.” The use of legitimacy and urgency in the appeal is all designed to create uptake in the victim. The scam email relies on uptake. The attacker is too far to pose a threat to the person and force the information out of the vicitm, so they must use deception to invoke uptake. Unlike President Washington, the attacker knows what uptake he or she expects and uses the genre of scam emails to craft the victim’s response. Without the uptake, the scam email is sterile and harmless. But if the audience is taken in and responds, the attack is potent to exploit the weakest point in the information security system – the human. |