Unemployed Programmers Going Phishing

Chris Arnold reported on “Tips to Avoid Internet Identity Theft, E-Mail Scams” during today’s Morning Edition on NPR. One recent development is organized crime’s growing involvement in such scams, for which unemployed computer programmers are being hired to write code for phishing attacks, “‘spoofed’ e-mails and fraudulent websites designed to fool recipients into divulging personal financial data such as credit card numbers, account usernames and passwords, social security numbers, etc.” The US government has created programs to hire or otherwise find new jobs for nuclear scientists in the former Soviet Union and Iraq; maybe we need a similar program to keep unemployed programmers from wreaking havoc on society.