Let me ask you a question: you get a letter in the mail box, delivered by a postman,
asking you to send it on to ten friends or else you will get bad luck.
What do you do? Do you sit down, write out ten copies, get ten envelopes, ten
stamps and then send the ten copies, or do you consign it to the round filing
cabinet?
Most people would put their hands up and say, ooh, ooh, the bin!
Let me take you a step further: you get a letter into your email inbox, delivered
electronically, telling you some sad sack story, bad news, virus alert, good news,
whatever, and it asks you to send it on to everyone in your address book.
What do you do now? If youre like every other average internet user youll go oh, I
should pass this warning on, I dont want to take the chance that a friend might get
caught with this. So, you trawl through your address book, insert all those email
addresses, hit send and whammo, youve just helped spread the latest (or oldest)
email hoax.
Why do people do this? Why, because its easier to pass on a hoax and pretend to
yourself that you are protecting others, than it is to spend thirty seconds doing a
cursory browser search for that email subject line.
I had a friend who sent me the java debugging email hoax. This hoax tries to
encourage you to delete a legitimate Windows file from your computer. Jdbgmgr.exe
is the file to which the hoax refers, and it is the Microsoft Debugger Registrar for
Java.
Being of a suspicious mind when it comes to emails I ring Microsoft in Australia to
find out if it is correct. When I ring my friend to advise her of this hoax, she wails
down the phone to me, but Ive already deleted it!
So how do you know if you have a hoax or not. Well, a genuine virus/trojan/worm
wont tell you about it, will it? Hoax emails are designed to spread confusion, create
unwarranted traffic with your ISP and clog up the system. They perpetuate and
survive because people dont use their commonsense and check before hitting that
forward and send set of buttons.
If we all took sixty seconds to check, the world would soon see the end of hoax
emails being spread. Its probably like seeing the end of smallpox, if we educate
ourselves, our friends, and everyone we knew about these they would soon stop. If
we send back hoax information then we help to educate those who sent it to us in
the first place.
Be considerate. Be careful. Be watchful, but most of all, be well educated for your
own safety.
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