Forwarded From: Nicholas Charles Brawn <ncb05@uow.edu.au>
23Jun98 CANADA: MANAGING - CYBERSCARES - E-MAIL HOAXES PRESS 'AGGRAVATE'
BUTTON.
By MARK MacKINNON.
The Globe and Mail
A friend or co-worker may have E-mailed you about the latest threat from
cyberspace: "VIRUS ALERT!!! If you receive an E-mail entitled 'Win a
Holiday' DO NOT open it."
You're then told all the horrible things that will happen if you ignore the
warning and read one of these diseased E-mails - usually a deleted hard
drive or something equally dire. And you're instructed to pass the warning
on to as many people as possible. Some chain letters claim to be
transmitting a warning put out by Microsoft Corp. or America Online Inc.
The only thing missing is a real virus. The E-mail warnings are hoaxes,
which have snowballed to the point where Internet veterans groan at their
mere mention. They seem to endlessly circulate, never running out of steam.
For the past half decade, dozens of variations of the virus warning have
made the E-mail rounds, each one as unfounded as the last. They're kept
alive by well-intentioned folks who find the message in their in-boxes,
then pass it on to everyone in their address books.
They are falling victim to a simple practical joke, says Jim Carroll,
co-author of The 1998 Canadian Internet Handbook. It's a joke that depends
on the naivete of users who aren't yet comfortable with the Internet's
power.
"People have a tendency to believe the worst about technology," he says.
"There's an implicit distrust."
These hoaxes don't require a lot of know-how to launch - just an E-mail
account and a mischievous mind. And the motivation? The messages accomplish
little besides slowing down the Internet and aggravating users. Mr. Carroll
says his best guess is that the perpetrators are long-time users who get a
kick out of duping the "newbies."
One thing is certain - the viruses aren't real. You can't get one from
reading the text of an E-mail message, no matter how many exclamation marks
are in the title. Viruses are only a concern if the E-mail contains an
attachment that you have to click on to execute.
"The basic advice we give everybody is if somebody sends you an attachment
you didn't request, treat it with extreme caution," says Wolfgang Stiller,
president of Stiller Research in Colorado Springs, Colo., a developer of
antivirus software.
So what's the best thing to do when you get an E-mail warning about a virus
you can contract by reading it? Delete it. Tell the person who sent it that
they just bought into one of the oldest cyberhoaxes.
One Web site set up by IBM (www.av.ibm.com/BreakingNews/HypeAlert/) is
devoted to debunking such myths. It traces the original Good Times hoax
(similar to the Win a Holiday version, but with a different title) back to
1994, when a university student posted the false warning on America Online.
Four years later, Mr. Stiller's company still receives at least one or two
phone calls and E-mail messages a day inquiring about the Good Times virus.
More recently, imitators have made the rounds, including the currently
popular Win a Holiday.
As with previous hoaxes, Internet users are warned via E-mail to
immediately delete any message received with Win a Holiday in the subject
line. They are urged to pass the warning on quickly.
The latest version doesn't score points for originality, but it is just as
aggravating as its predecessors.
"The biggest problem I have with these things is the waste of bandwidth,"
says Tom Foottit, an Internet software developer with Nepean, Ont.-based
SeeWind Design.
The Internet, he says, is like a pipe that only so much water can fit
through at once. When that pipe is clogged with virus warnings, everything
else slows down.
And the culprits aren't always Internet neophytes. Paul Krakowiak, manager
of Ottawa-based Internet service provider Trytel Internet Inc., is still
feeling red-faced after passing on a warning about the Join the Crew virus
(same hoax, different title) to his subscribers in February.
"It was a mistake," Mr. Krakowiak says, adding that he sent an apology soon
afterward. "Basically, I got confirmation from some idiot at (Northern
Telecom Ltd.) who told me it was real."
"WARNING! Reading this story could cause blindness. Please tell everyone
around you to put down their newspapers."
It would never work.
You just can't pull the same kind of gags with a technology that people are
comfortable with.
Toronto Globe and Mail
-o-
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Received on Mon Jun 29 10:24:00 1998