Hoax or Not, Treat It the Same

Late last year, my sister forwarded to me an email that foretold of great evil and destruction should anyone open an email with a “Happy New Year” greeting for a subject. The email begged us to save the world by forwarding it to everyone we know. She wanted to know if she should believe it.

More recently I got something similar, this one warning that a deadly email will have a subject concerning President Barack Obama’s acceptance speech. This one added an air of authenticity by claiming that a popular hoax-tracking site has verified the details to be true. Hoax or not, I rarely read past the subject line of these types of emails, and I never forward them to others. Here are my reasons why:

• Thousands of mass-mailing worms have been discovered, and new ones are found every day. Each one carries multiple variants of the email it sends out. I would never remember every subject and message that I need to avoid.
• Verifying the veracity of a virus warning doesn’t do you any good. Say you have an email that warns you not to open an attachment if the subject is “blahblah”, and the attachment name is “blah.exe.” Then everyone declares this email a hoax, not real, nothing to worry about. Does that mean if you do receive an email that matches the description of the “hoax,” that it’s safe to open? Of course not! This is exactly what happened with the AOL4FREE hoax. It started out as a hoax, then someone had the bright idea of using the information from that hoax to send out a real Trojan horse.
• There’s already too much spam going around. 
• Security is a lucrative business, and players in this industry are just as publicity-hungry as any. If a virus was a real and significant threat, you’ll find your friendly neighborhood security expert in every media outlet talking about it. So just watch or read the news.
• Every holiday or significant world event is inevitably followed by emails containing a message about that event and carrying a nasty payload. Everyone should learn to expect this already. It’s called social engineering.
• Rather than reading through all the virus warnings, it’s easier and much more effective to to keep in mind a fixed list of simple tips.

Valentine’s day is coming up. You don’t need a friend of a friend to warn you that pretty soon you’ll be getting a suspicious email love letter.

Tags: email, hoax, spam, virus