Talking chickens in my inbox

Seeing an email from my cousin in Europe, I clicked on it immediately. He usually has something funny to say, and this one was no exception. After a brief “Wesolych Swiat” (Happy Easter) greeting, I noticed that his email started talking to me. More precisely, it started singing, in the “bock-bock-bock” voice of a chicken. As I scrolled down I saw the cartoon chickens that were dancing, playing guitar and generally having a good time right there in my email in-box.

I’ve never had a talking email before, especially one that launched into chicken-song spontaneously without my having to click anything. It was hilarious, and in this case, harmless. But I can’t help but wonder if such things could be venues for malicious software. There are, I discovered upon further investigation, several applications that allow you to send “talking emails” to people, and even applications that will send your voicemail to your email box. One of the applications I saw that sends voicemail to email (MessageShuttle) uses encryption, and this would add the security needed to avoid any interim message hacking.

Voice-based email (and chicken voice email in particular) is still new, and I haven’t heard of any attacks that use this specifically. But, it could happen–and probably will. Use of encryption may be good or bad, depending on who’s doing the sending. Reputable commercial purveyors of audio email and voicemail-to-email applications could use encryption to protect users from malware, but an attacker or spammer could use the same technology to encrypt those voice-based emails and embed malware in them, and avoid detection during transmission up until the decrypt point. Encryption aside though, I have no doubt that the day will come, and soon, that my email box will spontaneously start blasting out  audio commercials for useless pharmaceuticals, and security managers will need to start blocking .wav files at the mail server.