For those of us who are active on the internet, hardly a week goes by when we don't receive a piece of mail warning about a putatively new computer or internet virus. The warnings get to be at least a mild source of concern. No small part of this concern is recollection of the moral in the childhood story about the boy who cried "wolf"--what if one needs to alert folks about a real virus, but the repeated distribution of hoaxes has inured everyone to virus warnings. Come to think of it, perhaps this is the long-term strategy of some evil force in the world...get everyone to ignore virus warnings and then release a real virus! Mayhaps I shouldn't raise this idea.
Recently, I adopted a semi-policy to combat this concern. I write to the person who sent the message and to all the other addresses in the message headers, explaining that the virus is a hoax. In such message, I often refer the readers to web sites that provide good information about virus hoaxes. Instead of having to assemble the web resources repeatedly for inclusion in the messages, I decided I'd simply put them in a page and refer the correspondents to that page. This is that page.
Probably one of the most authoritative sources about hoaxes is the U.S. Department of Energy's Computer Incident Advisory Capability page. CIAC's bulletins provide information about real viruses, trojan horses, and etc. (One can also find there a worthwhile page about internet chain letters.) For folks who would prefer a non-governmental source, here are three:There are continuing efforts to combat real computer incidents. For example, Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST) is an international consortium of computer incident response and security teams.
Yep, I know the plural of virus is viruses, not viri...I just couldn't resist.|| JohnL's home || office of special ed ||
This is http://curry.edschool.virginia.edu/~jwl3v/viri.html. The page was served to 38.107.191.103 on Tuesday, 24-Nov-2009 14:07:23 EST.