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Margaret I. Carr

Hoax Alert

I get a lot of email. Some of the email addresses I used are blocked against attachments but not all. Still, I don't lose much time because of viruses. What I mostly get are hoaxes. By now I recognize most of them at first glance:

• my email address is just one of many in the To: field
• somewhere in the text it urges me to forward it to everyone I care about
• it tells me I must act now or something awful will happen to my computer or a child will die or similar emotional trigger phrases
• many claim to be verified by some well-known company and/or the sender

What irks me most is the appeal to compassion. The old 'get rich quick' and socially disapproved pictures scams are still around but most new hoaxes target people's concern for others and desire to help.

Probably the only defense against hoaxes is to ignore them. Delete immediately or check them out and then delete. Don't play into their hands, waste bandwidth and make it harder for legitimate needs to be heard by forwarding them.

Here are a few of the many sites that list hoaxes. The first one also includes instructions for recovery if you got hit by the recent hoax that told you to delete a normal Windows file.

http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/sulfnbk.exe.warning.html

http://www.cyber.com.au/users/jenn/
http://www.cyber.com.au/users/jenn/layman/virus.html

http://www.hoaxkill.com/hoaxes.html
http://library.smsu.edu/Resources/hoaxes.html
http://hoaxbusters.ciac.org/

http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/vinfodb.html
http://vil.mcafee.com/hoax.asp

http://kumite.com/myths/

The Urban Legends reference pages

http://www.icq.com/support/urge.html

Margaret I. Carr