These days the words "information security" put everyone in mind of e-mail scams, malicious websites, and leaked databases. In other words, it's a phrase that's become very tightly coupled with the criminal or near-criminal downsides of our electronically-connected world. As an example of this, consider the usual advice for handling email safely: always check a link's URL (or don't click on it if you don't know the recipient), don't blindly open attachments, verify that the email came from a trusted recipient, etc. etc.

But such schemes aren't necessarily new, they're just scaled up to a larger degree and easier than ever to crank out. Nor does it mean that the older methods are necessarily extinct, although they may have partially fallen out of style. ("What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun." —Ecclesiastes 1:9 although expressing a different sentiment)

Case in point: about this time last year I received a very nice Christmas card in the mail. It had a postmarked stamp and a cursive address and even a smiling snowman return address sticker. But who was sending me a card from way out in California? I opened the red-and-white card to find…an advertisement for a certain satellite dish company. Right. Yeah. Thanks, I certainly feel comfortable doing business with you now. After checking the envelope more closely, I realized the "handwritten" recipient address was actually a printed cursive font. The tell-tale was the exactly-identical letter shapes and the perfectly consistent pen-stroke pattern. I wonder how many grandmothers they managed to sucker in?

However, what prompted this post is something I received this week, which took great pains to appear as if it were from a next-door neighbor. (No, it wasn't a political mailer, but I've been getting those too.) For the sake of my privacy, let's say I live on "Thompson Drive" in an area called "Brookside Place".

The envelope was addressed to "Neighbor" at Thompson Drive, which struck me as a little odd because (a) I don't exchange letters with my neighbors, and (b) I would expect them to know me by name if I did. Also, the sender was one Shawn Lane which rules out anybody at the apartment office. So I check the postmark which told a more truthful story: the originating zip code began with a 9, clearly on the wrong side of the country.

It turned out to be a card (of sorts) advertising some sort of service called "Nextdoor" that I guess is supposed to help neighbors connect online. The card is an invitation to join for free, with an invite code. The text begins "Dear Brookside Neighbor" and is signed "Shawn Lane from Thompson Drive". Now, I don't know for certain if this is a legitimate business or not. If it is, it's clearly making a bad first impression. If not…well, I don't care enough to investigate further.

At any rate, this is about the time of year when the political mailers give way to early holiday advertisements and so forth. Scams don't always happen online. Keep alert, and stay safe out there!