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.''








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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