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