ureadit

Much has been appearing in the press lately about the concept of virtual machines. I suspect this trend will continue into the foreseeable future, as the economics and practicality of virtual machines is realized by mainstream businesses.

But what is it? I’ll give the short answer in this blog.

A virtual computer is nothing more than a sophisticated piece of software that runs on a computer, and its main purpose is to simulate the actions of . . . another computer! Why run software to simulate a computer when the software itself already runs on a computer? It does seem a bit redundant to build a computer only to simulate a computer, but there are some big advantages to doing this:

WARNING: International scammers that operate beyond the reach of U.S. Law are using ordinary citizens to help them funnel illegal money to their accounts. You can easily be duped into taking part in this scheme if you are not careful.

So how does it work?

Here’s how, in story format:

Mr. Scammer, currently residing in the Czech Republic, wants to be rich, so he decides to rob a bank located in the United States. He chooses a bank, which we’ll call “U.S. Bank,” because it has some very wealthy customers and its security for online transactions doesn’t seem too strict. Starting with a list of bank customers, Mr. Scammer tries different nefarious means of guessing usernames and passwords. Because he’s casting such a wide net over a lot of customers, he increases the odds that he’ll get lucky. And indeed, after several weeks, he is finally rewarded with a welcome screen to a corporate bank account. Searching through the account, he finds that there is over a million dollars sitting there, just waiting to be taken. Mr. Scammer gets very excited. He sees himself sitting on the beach in Cabo San Lucas, mai tai in hand, pretty girls all around, and plenty of warm sunshine.