12.19.02
On Viruses, Legends and SPAM
The advent of the Internet and Electronic Mail (email) has allowed for unprecedented speeds of information flow. Unfortunately with this came a new and impressive pathway for misinformation to flow. Most of you will within the first year of getting an email account receive warnings about email viruses, be offered great opportunities for wealth, and be asked to contribute email to a worthy causes. I would like to warn you about some particularly common scams, SPAM and urban legends that have been clogging our networks for the last few years:
There is no ‘Good Times’ or ‘Deeyenda’ virus. It is impossible for your hard drive to be infected, formatted, erased, garbled or otherwise damaged by reading email. If someone sends you a binary file as an email attachment AND you choose to execute it without checking its origin first you might inadvertently run a Trojan virus (a harmful program that masquerades as a useful one). Any software you receive should be checked for viruses before running it, but simply reading your email cannot infect your computer with a virus. Most virus warnings received over email are bogus.
Little ‘Timmy’ does not need your email. This legend is based on Craig Shergold’s request to make the Guinness Book of World Records for receiving the most greeting cards and has since been modified into requests to send email to various fake addresses. Sometimes there a boy in a local hospital who just wants to know who got the chain-mail he originated. These are urban legends started by pranksters. Often the email message you are supposed to send your email to, is that of some poor unsuspecting victim who will probably be flooded with unsolicited email. You should never send unsolicited email to an address unless you can confirm the recipient is legit (via a World Wide Web page or an actual phone call.)
Most people don’t like chain letters. Even if they include incredibly funny stories, anyone who has been on the Internet for a while will have already received the chain letter more than once and most probably does not want to see it again. The National Endowment for the Arts, PBS, NPR or Sesame Street will not benefit from you signing a petition to save them and then forwarding it to friends. If you are the 500th signer, Bill Gates will not send you $100.
He never had to pay for the chocolate cake recipe. This is a classic urban legend where the ‘original sender’ gives a sob story about having to pay for a chocolate cake or chocolate chip cookie recipe at a restaurant and is getting back at them by emailing the recipe to people and then asking them to forward it on. This story has circulated the Internet since before 1990 and is still bouncing around.
No matter who you reply to over email you will not ‘Get Rich Quick!!’ nor will Microsoft send you $1,000 and the latest copy of their software. These are simple pyramid scams.
You will not have your kidneys stolen while visiting a foreign country. If you don’t know the details, you don’t want to know.
America Online software does not steal secret information from your hard-drive. While it is perfectly possible that their software may report what kind of computer you have, I doubt the top executives at America Online have any interest in reading the poetry you secretly hide deep in the recesses of your computer.
Do not send SPAM and turn in those who do. Offers of ‘cyberbombers’ or ‘mass mailers’ which promise to send out ‘over a thousand messages an hour’ and ‘increase your sales’ are propagating one of the most hated annoyances on email: junk mail (a.k.a. SPAM). If you get commercial email, even if it begins by apologizing for the intrusion and ends with instructions on how to ‘remove yourself from this list’ turn the offender to your systems administrator, do not reply (the address that is supposed to remove you from the list is usually a method of collection addresses for more lists) and do not support their business. SPAM emailers are like fleas in a hay mattress: all over the place, hard to get rid of and annoying as all hell.
There are dozens of other stories that circulate the Internet such as the two yahoos who strapped a jet pack on their pinto to get a good velocity, or the guy who used a bullet as a fuse. These stories tend to be amusing and can be forwarded for others’ enjoyment, but please think twice before forwarding any message that asks you to pass it on.
As a final note, be wary of any message that encourages you to ‘Pass this ON!’ or does not reference a WWW page or other source to confirm the information.
For more information on Urban Legends and false computer viruses see:
http://dir.yahoo.com/Society_and_Culture/Mythology_and_Folklore/Urban_Legends/
or
http://urbanlegends.about.com/science/urbanlegends/
or
http://www.urbanlegends.com/
on real viruses and how to prevent infections see:
http://dir.yahoo.com/computers_and_internet/security_and_encryption/viruses/
for a virus encyclopedia including a list of hoaxes see:
http://vil.nai.com/villib/alpha.asp
or
http://www.mcafee.com/anti-virus/
on unsolicited junk email (SPAM) see:
http://spam.abuse.net/
Or if you don’t believe me, find out that it is all true.