That's when I learned about the paranoid users. Some knew it was a scam, but some were truly afraid of losing their job. A few confessed to visiting porn sites on their computer at home and thought this was related. Three employees responded to the threat by divulging credit card numbers and now have problems with charges on their card.

We told them what was going on and had them call their credit card companies right away.

Then we put some blocks in our e-mail filters to kill off any more e-mails like that one. We blocked the IP addresses from FTP and Web access in case the same culprits try it again. We decided to do the same procedure again if they change addresses or e-mail message types.

Filtering is a very on-or-off type of experience. We don't usually pick up any changes in the attack automatically, and so we decided to see a sample to tune the filters and kill off other variants of the message as well. It was the same problem we had with the spam filters. Spammers have an easy time tweaking messages to get around any filters we set up.

What fun. Security gets messy when it involves employees' privacy and protection from things like this. I have had to deal with the lovelorn stalker e-mail and the vicious ex-spouse mail several times.