Interspersed among the junk mail and spam that fills our Internet e-mail boxes are dire warnings about devastating new viruses, Trojans that eat the heart out of your system, and malicious software that can steal the computer right off your desk. Added to that are messages about free money, children in trouble, and other items designed to grab you and get you to forward the message to everyone you know. Most all of these messages are hoaxes or chain letters. While hoaxes do not automatically infect systems like a virus or Trojan, they are still time consuming and costly to remove from all the systems where they exist. At HOAXBUSTERS, they say "We find that we spend much more time de-bunking hoaxes than handling real virus and Trojan incidents." Here's a website that describes some of the warnings, offers, and pleas for help that are filling our mailboxes, clogging our mailservers, and that generally do not have any basis in fact.
In addition to describing hoaxes and chain letters found on the Internet, this website discusses how to recognize hoaxes, what to do about them, and some of the history of hoaxes on the Internet.
Check it out at: http://hoaxbusters.ciac.org/
No comments:
Post a Comment