Old hoaxes don’t die…

…they just move to new mediums. Waaaay back in 1994, a computervirus hoax known as Good Times was passed around the Internet. Whilenot the first computer virus hoax, it is probably one of the bestknown. Since then there have been many similar hoaxes all promisingcertain destruction of your computer if you open an email originatingfrom a certain address or simply by reading certain words that appearon your monitor. Naturally, when many people receive one of thesehoaxes they decide to forward the message to all their friends andfamily to save them from this fate, thus helping the chain letter tospread (if I tell two friends and they tell two friends…).

In recent years, I noticed that these messages were showing up in myinbox less and less frequently. Did people learn not to believe thesemessages? Well, apparently not. They seem to be making a comeback, butrather than being sent via email they’re now sent through the messagingsystems on various social networking sites, as well as through instantmessaging programs. It seems that a lot of people have now beenconditioned not to trust email messages. Unfortunately, they appear tobe a lot more trusting of messages they receive from their socialnetworking friends.

Big deal. Who cares about a few extra hoax messages zipping aroundthese sites? It’s their bandwidth and not yours after all. Well, thebig deal seems to be with where people are placing their trust. They’retrusting that messages they get through these sites are authoritativeand legitimate. They also trust links and applications they see ontheir friends’ profile pages. So what happens when one of these hoaxmessages also includes a link to a program that will “detect andremove” some super virus from your computer? How many people willfollow that link only to have it lead to a page that exploits some Webbrowser vulnerability to install a real malicious program?

Just some food for thought…