"You must take care when downloading an attachment
to an e-mail message. In some mail readers you can double click on the attachment icon to have it extracted and
opened by whatever program created it. If that attachment is a program, it is downloaded and run, and running any
program you have not scanned could cause you to be infected with a virus." (Quoted from CIAC)
Some viruses can result from the most innocuous-seeming files, such as happy99.exe, or the Melissa worm, and can be spread unknowingly by innocent persons.
More often though, what is being spread by innocent persons is the daily influx of VIRUS WARNING!!s, which 95 times out of 100 are hoaxes, perpetrated by jokesters who get their jollies from panicking people and clogging the Internet with increasing gluts of spam. Generally speaking, any email which prefaces and ends with "tell EVERYONE on your e-mail list!!!!", will be a hoax. Actually, you can probably just count the exclamation marks to readily recognize a hoax. Hoaxes are not just limited to virus scares, either. Hundreds of hoaxes known as Urban Legends have circled the Internet since the beginning. Have you ever gotten the E-mail warning about
Here are some of the popular hoaxes that resurface every year:
The best way to distinguish a real warning from a hoax is to run it past one of the following reliable sources:
Make it a regular practice to check these sites before forwarding any of those VIRUS WARNING! e-mails. You'll feel better, and your e-mail buddies will thank you.
Computer viruses are very real. They can not be spread by opening an e-mail, but can be triggered only by downloading and executing executable (.exe) files that may be attached to an e-mail. For that reason, you should never accept an executable file from someone you do not know, and should run any you accept from a known person through an anti-virus program before executing it. We recommend either Norton by Symantec or Mcafee.
So, how can you tell a hoax from the real thing? First, the hoax will always exhort you to forward the e-mail to as many people as possible. Quite often the hoax will cite some well-respected agency as the author, i.e. "the FCC", "government computer security agencies, and makers of anti-virus software", "Researchers at Princeton University have found this virus on a number of World Wide Web pages and fear its spread." Last, the warning will almost always tell you that just opening your email containing this virus will completely destroy your hard drive. Remember, a virus can only be spread by executing an executable file, not by simply opening an email.
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