FYI: Interesting article. Very informative. Published Wednesday, October 20, 1999, in the Lexington Herald Leader Web lets e-mail hoaxes multiply Chain letters do damage by clogging networks By Jon Fortt HERALD-LEADER BUSINESS WRITER When the e-mail message hits your ``in'' box, it seems innocent enough. It tells you there's a devastating new computer virus out, so warn everyone you know. Or that a little girl has cancer and her dying wish is to send an e-mail message around the world. Or that some multinational corporation -- say, Disney or Microsoft -- will fork over cash or a free trip each time you forward an e-mail. Don't believe the hype. Chain-letter hoaxes such as these tend to get less ink than computer viruses; but in the Information Age, e-mailed chain letters can be damaging. ``If a person sends one of these to 50 of his friends and each sends it to 50 of their friends, it multiplies tremendously and bogs down the network,'' said John Bickford, Lessons Learned coordinator for the U.S. Department of Energy in Hanford, Wash. Bickford organized an effort last year to educate Energy Department employees and to stop federal servers from being slammed by chain letters. Bottom line: If a message urges you to spread the word, Bickford said, it might well be a hoax, no matter how sincere it sounds. ``When in doubt, do not forward the message,'' he said. In a sense, chain letters are like computer viruses that work only as well as their victims let them. But instead of carrying code that corrupts files on your hard drive, they gum up computer networks by hogging space. Hoax letters and viruses are mostly the work of the PlayStation demographic: males ages 15-25 with too much time on their hands, said Darren Kessner, senior virus researcher at Symantec Corp., based in Cupertino, Calif. ``They like to see it spread as far as they possibly can,'' Kessner said. Predictably, more viruses go into circulation when school is out. ``They just do it for fun, it seems.'' A scam artist's key to provoking chain-letter mayhem is persuading message recipients to play along. In the days before e-mail, that meant using pyramid schemes or threatening bad luck. Back then, when scam artists had to pay for stamps, chain letters were less common. Today e-mail is free, and the rules have changed. Early adopters of e-mail might remember mid-90s hoopla about the ``Good Times'' virus. The typical warning e-mail came with the subject, ``Good Times.'' ``If you get anything called `Good Times,' DON'T read it or download it,'' the message read. ``It is a virus that will erase your hard drive. Forward this to all your friends. It may help them a lot.'' The irony was that the fake warning had the same subject line as the supposed virus. But the virus didn't exist, and the warning was just a chain letter. Also, viruses attack software, and it's unlikely that a virus could travel by e-mail and automatically erase a hard drive in the manner the message described, according to Data Fellows, a data-security provider with headquarters in Espoo, Finland. And it is unlikely that a virus could travel inside a simple e-mail message, without any attachments. ``Hoaxes are problematic partly because it's kind of like crying wolf,'' said Symantec's Kessner. ``The most important thing for people to do is pretty much ignore these chain-letter hoaxes and rely on the Web sites of trusted anti-virus centers to get their information.'' -- ************************************************************************************ I dread success. To have succeeded is to have finished one's business on earth, like the male spider, who is killed by the female the moment he has succeeded in his courtship. I like a state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind... George Bernard Shaw, Playwright, 1856-1950