SENSE AND INSENSITIVITY - A novel cover for cybercriminals?

Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen fans will be horrified to hear that her novels are currently being used by cybercriminals to conceal online hacking.

Passages from Sense and Sensibility, written in 1811 and still one of the author's most enduring works, have been discovered 'wrapped around' malicious software, according to The Times newspaper this week. The aim is to to dupe virus scanners into believing that they are in the presence of a respectable web page. The hidden virus is then free to attack the victim's computer.

And, according to a report by technology company Cisco  UK, what they call 'Austen-based attacks' are on the rise. For users encountering unexpected references to their favourite Jane Austen characters - such as Elinor Dashwood and Mrs Jennings - on a web page may be perplexing but not a cause for alarm, says the report, 'but their lack of unease gives adversaries more opportunity...'

Hackers, it seems, also use text from magazines and blogs which prove a better strategy than using random strings of text.  Even more worrying is the suggestion that cybercriminals are increasingly mirroring the practice of legitimate businesses by setting up customer support lines and offering warranties to hackers who buy their software.

Meanwhile, mature 'newbie' authors like me who try to have a good online presence might be forgiven for disappearing into the attic to find ancient leather-bound copies of their favourite works. After all, if you can't join them you might as well beat them. What do you think?
 

Do you know how to say No?

I've never been very good at saying No.  The little Yes word slides out of my mouth before my brain assesses the implications. Yes, I'll work on my day off, yes I'll come to your grandmother's ninetieth birthday party, yes I'll attend one of those jewellery parties where they sell cheap looking pieces at exorbitant prices. So I was fascinated to read this week of a survey of 350,000 books published in Britain between 1800 and the year 2000 which shows a huge decline in the words 'duty' and 'obligation' in the body of the text. No-one told me that these had gone out of fashion...

The survey, carried out at the University of California in Los Angeles, quotes the inimitable Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice fending off an unwelcome invitation from  Lady Catherine de Bourgh. 'I am much obliged to your ladyship for your kind invitation, but it is not in my power to accept it. I must be in town next Saturday.'  Now why didn't I think of that?

Not surprisingly  it seems the words  'choose' and 'get' have increased  in latter years as well as, more significantly, the word 'feel,' a reflection perhaps, of our so-called touchy feely society. Professor Patricia Greenfield, who led the research, believes that this shows 'a shift in society away from living in small communities in a rural environment towards materialistic urban living.'  In other words we've all become more self-centred and prefer to look after Number One.  Now why am  not surprised?

This investigation, published in  Psychological Science journal, also involved more than one million books published in the US during the same  200 year period, including popular fiction and text books. Interestingly, Professor Greenfield used  a very modern approach - Google's word count tool, the Ngram Viewer, which can count word frequencies in millions of books in less than a second.
I wonder what Elizabeth Bennet would make of that?