Security Center: Email Hoaxes

• What email hoaxes are
• Why email hoaxes are bad
• What you should do if you receive a hoax email

EMAIL HOAXES

What email hoaxes are

Virus hoaxes typically are generated as chain messages you receive in your email, typically from friends, family, or co-workers. The email warns about devastating new viruses, trojans that "eat" up your system and all of its resources, and malicious software that can track what you do on your computer. Generally, the emails also have 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.

Why email hoaxes are bad

While hoaxes do not automatically infect systems like a virus or a trojan, they are still time consuming and costly to remove from systems where they exist. Users, typically fearing the worst, follow the instructions in emails about deleting one or several files on their computer. Often, these files are critical to running your computer's operating system and should not be deleted. Deleting these files can cause your computer to not run certain applications or even worse, cause your computer to come to a screeching halt and crash, forcing you to reboot and possibly having to reinstall everything. Then, to top things off, the message gets forwarded on before the user has time to experience the adverse effects for themselves.

What you should do if you receive a hoax email

When you receive an "urgent" virus message, check the message against the list of known virus hoaxes found on one of the webpages below...

• http://vil.nai.com/vil/hoaxes.asp (McAfee)
• http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/hoax.html (Symantec)
• http://www.sophos.com/virusinfo/hoaxes/ (Sophos)
• http://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/hoaxes/hoax.asp (TrendMicro)

If you do not find the warning at any of these sites, it just may mean that they have not yet seen this particular hoax. See if the warning includes the name of the person submitting the original warning. If it does, see if you can determine if the person really exists. If they do, don't send them an e-mail message. It is likely that they have nothing to do with this hoax and all of the people sending them questions about the message will be just as damaging to them as sending around the hoax message.

Remember: Never open an email attachment unless you know what it is, even if it comes from someone you know and trust. Always be cautious and suspicious.

If you still cannot determine if a message is real or a hoax, you can forward the message to BCPL.net at and we can help validate it.