Virus or Hoax?
Posted on October 12, 2005
Filed Under Internet, Security |
It doesn’t always take a real computer virus to cause fear and anxiety among computer users. The mere thought that something bad might happen to one’s computer can drive many users into a panic. Knowing that the simple suggestion of a virus has such an affect is enough to compel some people to create fear without ever having to create a virus.
Virus hoaxes are a common addition to the vast volume of worthless email that circulates the Internet every day. You’ve probably seen a number of them yourself. A recent hoax read like this (grammatical errors and all):
Thought you might be interested in this message. If you receive an email with a file called “California” do not open the file. The file contains the “WOBBLER” virus.
This information was announced yesterday morning by IBM. The report says …”this is a very dangerous virus, much worse than “Melissa” and there is NO remedy for it at this time. Some very sick individual has succeeded in using the reformat function from Norton Utilities causing it to completely erase all documents on the hard drive. It has been designed to work with Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer. It destroys Macintosh and IBM compatible computers. This is a new, very malicious virus and not many people know about it at this time. Please pass this warning to everyone in your address book and share it all your online friends asap so that the destruction it can cause may be minimized”
In addition to causing fear and anxiety, virus hoaxes waste bandwidth, hard drive space, memory, and user time. Every time a user is duped by one of these hoaxes, they follow the instructions and spread the con on to everyone they know.
Everyone wants to help a friend but how can you tell if an email warning is a hoax?
• You are urged to warn all of your friends or everyone you know — The author wants you to spread the hoax and plays on our desire to protect our friends from harm.
• A well known company is mentioned as being the source of the warning — It is easier to swallow the hoax if it is suggested that a company like IBM or Symantec has released the warning.
• There is no reference to the original warning release — Had IBM or Symantec released this information, certainly there would be a reference on their web site that the author could use.
• There are dire warnings that data will be destroyed and be irrecoverable — How better to scare someone into passing the message along?
Another sure fire way to determine if a warning is a hoax is to search for the emails subject line in Google. Copy and paste the subject line to be sure there are no typos and enclose it in quotation marks. If this is a hoax, the first few results on Google should identify it as such.
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