The American View: Why the Scam Calls Need to Come from Inside the House
The American View: Why the Scam Calls Need to Come from Inside the House
I enjoy phishing. There’s something richly satisfying about crafting a fake email that can trick an unsuspecting victim into infecting their company with ransomware, all thanks to a clever arrangement of colour, text weighting, graphics, and misdirection. It’s like a magic trick carried out entirely through correspondence. It’s artistic expression with an immediate payoff … I don’t have to wait for a gallery exhibition to gage the public’s appreciation of my work because I get immediate feedback in the form of compromised PCs and howls of outrage. It’s brilliant fun.
Everybody knows the story. The young babysitter, all alone in the house with the kids in bed, and the telephone rings. There’s a creepy guy’s voice on the other end of the line asking “Have you checked the children?” She hangs up but the guy keeps calling back. Finally the babysitter calls the police who tells her… the call is coming from inside the house! While the “get out of the house, now!” twist had been used in
Black Christmas, When A Stranger Calls taps into a different fear.
As director and co-writer Fred Walton tells us, it’s not just the idea that this could happen. People believed it already had.