Forget Rickrolling - Jeb Bush Releases Viruses Online
posted Sunday Feb 15, 2015 by Scott Ertz
Did you hear? Jeb Bush might be running for President. If you haven't heard yet, don't worry - you will. He is likely to be this election cycle's Hillary with a will he/won't he media blitz. In the end, there is no doubt that he will appear all over television before finally announcing that he is running, and making a showing at that.
In an attempt to be more like Obama and less like Hillary, however, Jeb is trying his hand at the Internet. Some say it is what ended up winning Obama his first term. However, it would appear that Jeb might have never used the Internet before. If he has, he used it more like an old person than a young person: a scenario that should be kept private, right?
Well, that isn't quite how things went down. Instead of pretending he knew what he was doing on the web, he released a huge cache of emails that he sent and received while he was governor of Florida. His goal was to show he uses computers and that he is willing to be open with the people. Being open is great, but some information should be redacted - it's why the concept was invented. You shouldn't release it with only the words "it," "he" and "the" left in, but you should probably remove some stuff.
For example, before releasing emails, you should probably scrub all of the email and physical addresses that might be contained within them. The alternative is, you just released a spammer's dream document: email addresses of people in Florida, who are probably just as adept at the computer as you are.
More importantly, you should verify that there are no attachments in the emails that will make you look like an old Floridian - for example, viruses. In this case, Jeb received viruses to his jeb@jeb.org email address: likely from the same people who are scanning these emails for new addresses. Contained within these released emails is a veritable museum of the early 2000's best viruses: Happy99, JS/Kak@M and W32.Badtrans.B@mm, just to name a few.
Since this gaff, the unaltered Outlook PST files have been removed and a new, intelligently redacted version has been released instead.
