WANews

The Hoax That Cried Virus

Gullible users turn hoaxes into manually-driven worms

Related Resources

• Hoax Encyclopedia
• Virus Encyclopedia
• Glossary of terms

Most Common Hoaxes

• Virtual Card for You
• Family Pictures
• Sector Zero
• Takes Guts to say Jesus

From Other Guides

• Urban Legend Guide
• Phenylpropanolamine

Computer virus hoaxes have been around for nearly as long as the first virus. Just after the 1988 introduction of the infamous Morris Internet worm, the first hoax began circulating. One might even consider hoaxes to be a cottage industry for the virus writers. Indeed, hoaxes, with their ominous warnings or fictitious promises of instant wealth, often seem far more believable to users than do legitimate warnings of actual threats. This in itself is disturbing, as once burned by a hoax many choose to disregard valid alerts as well. Hoaxes are arguably nothing more than a manually-driven email worm. By definition, a worm is a piece of malicious code that copies itself over and over again, either on the users system or, in modern times, by spreading itself through email. While the real worm relies on sophisticated coding to achieve spread, the craftily worded hoax simply relies on the user to do its dirty deed. As a result, a hoax can spread around the Internet in hours, clogging inboxes, saturating mail servers, and frustrating administrators who are charged with debunking these erroneous messages. The fact is, hoaxes have only one purpose in life and that is to spread to as many people as possible. Quite the same goal as most viruses, in fact.

What many don’t realize is that just as viruses cost recipients, so do hoaxes. Case in point: should a well-meaning network administrator believe a particular hoax is true – and shutdown the mail servers as a precaution – the resulting loss of productivity will be just as high as if a real virus attack had occurred. Hoaxbusters, formerly dedicated to eradicating the misconceptions regarding hoaxes and urban myths, takes another stance. They have determined the actual people hours involved with reading and forwarding just such erroneous information and prepared an eye-opening report on the high cost of believing. In the report, Hoaxbusters astutely points out that "if everyone on the Internet were to receive one hoax message and spend one minute reading and discarding it, the cost: would be something like: 50,000,000 people * 1/60 hour * $50/hour = $41.7 million". Hoaxbuster’s provocative look at the problem delves not only into the people-hour cost, but also into the toll taken on mail servers and network bandwidth. Indeed, after reading such an essay, it is easy to see that hoaxes are far from benign.

The second problem hoaxes deliver is complacency. An individual, already embarrassed once for naively believing in a hoax, is much less likely to accept a valid virus warning as being true. Thus, a valid warning is met with disbelief and apathy. In such a case, a hoax can be considered a potential precursor to disaster.

With the inherent negativity of a hoax already established, what should we do when a hoax message is received? Do we succumb to potentially misguided helpfulness and forward it on as suggested? Many fall into the "just-in-case" trap. They forward the email to everyone in their address book, despite their misgivings or doubt, just in case it might be true. As seen in the calculations above, this "just-in-case" forwarding is damaging. So what should we do?

Take a time out. If the e-mail sounds like a hoax, it probably is. Do not instantly react to save the world. You can be certain, if it's a real threat, the news media and legitimate antivirus sources will publish all the necessary alerts.
Check out the facts. The Hoax Information Center provides a comprehensive list of the most common hoaxes.
If you are in an enterprise, ask your system administrator to verify its accuracy.
Try a simple search on a site such as Google to see what information there is about it.
When in doubt, don't sent it out.
If you've received a report of a legitimate virus, you still should not forward it. Instead, take a few moments to find a valid link on an antivirus or security site and send the link instead. You'll be doing yourself, and the entire Internet, a favor.

If you still need further reason to refrain from forwarding these fakes, consider this: hoax forwarding is the trademark behavior of a new and inexperienced computer user. Is that really how you want to be perceived by your friends and colleagues? And, finally, neither Bill Gates, nor Outback Steakhouse, nor anyone else is going to give you money for forwarding emails. This most definitely falls in the realm of "too good to be true".

OK, that's going to have to be it until I find out what's going on with this mess. Besides template problem it took three reboots, virus checking every time, to get back up and running after a hard freeze.

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