Distracted by holiday stress? E-mail hackers are banking on it - The Boston Globe

Another innovative bitcoin application domain

"Earlier this week, researchers from IBM identified a phishing campaign that appeared to come from an actual Amazon.com corporate e-mail address, with a subject line reading: “Your Amazon.com order has dispatched,” along with a fake tracking number.

The messages contained an attachment that downloaded a program called Locky, a type of ransomware that renders someone’s digital files inaccessible until they cough up a payment, typically several hundred dollars’ worth of the cryptocurrency bitcoin, said Caleb Barlow, a vice president with Cambridge’s IBM security division."

Distracted by holiday stress? E-mail hackers are banking on it - The Boston Globe