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Protect Yourself from Virus Hoaxes and Myths

© Leslie Truex

"FYI! Subject: Virus Alert Importance: High If anyone receives mail entitled: PENPAL GREETINGS! please delete it WITHOUT reading it. Below is a little explanation of the message, and what it would do to your PC if you were to read the message. If you have any questions or concerns please contact SAF-IA Info Office on 697-5059."

How often do you receive emails such as this? Daily? Twice a day? If you work at home, it is likely your computer is the main resource for the transfer of data, maintaining contact with your boss, and conducting your work. As a result, the treat of viruses is very real and should be taken seriously. Unfortunately, it's nearly impossible to keep up on all the viruses particularly since many of the alerts you receive are actually hoaxes ... as was the alert printed above.

How can we, as home workers who rely on our computers to earn us income, protect ourselves and yet not be taken in by hoaxes? What is a virus hoax and why to do people bother sending them? According to HoaxBusters (http://hoaxbusters.ciac.org/), computer viruses have been around since 1988 and the resulting hoaxes quickly followed. "With thousands of viruses worldwide, virus paranoia in the community has risen to an extremely high level. It is this paranoia that fuels virus hoaxes."

The purpose of the hoaxes is to get people to send the message on to others. Often the message is outdated and/or untrue and usually has a sense of urgency or plays on people's sympathy. Aside from spreading exponentially, these hoaxes can be used to harvest emails addresses for spamming, to harass others, to make money (chain letters), to stop another hoax, or to damage another person or organizations reputation.

Despite the inconvenience, is there anything really wrong with these hoaxes? According to Hoaxbusters, these hoaxes can cost millions of dollars. "If everyone on the Internet were to receive one hoax message and spend one minute reading and discarding it, the cost would be something like: 50,000,000 people X 1/60 hour X $50/hour = $41.7 million." Not only that, but if every one who receives the hoax, forwards it to 10 other people, within six generations the hoax will have been sent to 1 million people. That's a lot work on mail servers, which can get bogged down forcing them to slow down or even crash.

The question then becomes, how can we decipher the true virus alerts from scams? According to Vmyths http://vmyths.com, there are several tip offs to a computer virus hoax.