False Alarm: Email Hoaxes

 

Have you ever received an email warning of a virus that would melt your hard drive and rename your files, pleading with you to forward the message to "everyone you know?" Have you ever forwarded an email from the friend of a friend warning that a worm might have left a dangerous file on your computer? If so, you may have passed on an Internet hoax. A hoax is an email warning recipients of a fictitious virus or other topic of concern. Since 1998, these troublesome emails have relied on recipients' desire to share the seemingly dire information with everyone in their address book. But these tricky emails do not help anyone. Rather they spread through the Internet, causing panic and clogging servers wherever they go.

 

Why Start a Hoax?

Hoax writers no doubt have various reasons for creating these pesky emails. Some of them may be:

• To experiment to see how far the email will go
• To gain bragging rights to fellow hoax creators when a hoax becomes widespread or "famous"
• To slander a person, company, government, or product

Hoaxes: Bad for Business

These problem emails waste time and resources wherever they make an appearance. Here are just a few of the ways hoaxes can damage your small business:

 

• Wasted business resources. Hoax emails are a waste of resources for your individual business and for the Internet in general. As their creators intend, these emails are capable of exponential reproduction in a short amount of time. If a single person receives and forwards a hoax to 10 people, and those people send it on to 10 people, the hoax is spread quickly across the Internet, clogging networks, crashing servers, hogging bandwidth, and slowing down the important traffic on the Internet.
• Wasted human resources. A business' resources are wasted when employees spend time reading a hoax, researching its validity, and forwarding it to everyone in their mailbox.

 

• Possible spam list contribution. Spammers may use the email addresses of people listed in the forward header to send unsolicited bulk email. Spammers may find these lists useful because most of the addresses will be recent, "live" email addresses.

   

• Distraction from real viruses. Some people may receive one hoax after another, leading them to ignore future virus alerts. If one of the ignored warnings turns out to be a legitimate alert, your small business network could be compromised by a virus.

   

The characteristics of a Hoax

 

While these characteristics are not limited to hoaxes, be suspicious if you see a couple of them contained in one email:

 

• A call to action. "Send this to everyone you know," or a variant of that statement, such as "add your name to the petition," or "send an email to this person or company."
• Excessive jargon. While some virus or other warnings do contain relatively technical language, hoaxes tend to be drowning in jargon -- most of which does not make sense if you read closely. Hoax creators put in lots of big words to impress the recipient into believing their credibility.

   

• Attack a specific person or establishment. Many of these press-release style emails turn out to be a person with a vendetta against someone and is trying to slander that person. Some popular hoaxes that are circulating the Internet revolve around celebrities like Bill Gates, or false claims like the U.S. Postal Service charging for email.
• Information three-times-removed. If your friend or co-worker is not the person who heard about this virus directly, but received it as a forward from a string of other people, the source is not necessarily reliable. Credible virus warnings come from places like anti-virus software manufacturers or news sources.

 

Put the Forward Button on Hold

If you think there's a hoax in your inbox:

• Don't propagate the hoax. Make sure you know the virus warning is legitimate before clogging bandwidth and causing panic. Keep your mouse away from that "Forward" button until you've got some concrete evidence.
• Do your research. If you're intent on spending time to verify that an email is a hoax, there are many places on the Web where you can confirm valid virus threats and debunk hoax warnings. Visit the Symantec Resource Center to get the latest virus warnings, look up possible hoaxes, and download new definitions if the virus turns out to be real.
• Get up to date. Make sure your anti-virus software is current and your virus definitions are up to date. If the warning turns out to be a real virus, you will be protected. Update your virus definitions for Norton AntiVirus at the Symantec Resource Center.

   

The email about a bogus virus may seem harmless, but this hoax wastes both time and resources -- and has other nasty side effects as well. Update your virus definitions to protect your computer from real threats, and take that anti-Bill Gates email begging you to "send this to everyone you know" with a grain of salt.