Hoax virus warnings
Hoaxes about viruses have a nasty habit of appearing in your inbox. A friend asked me last week about an e-mail warning that his sister had forwarded. The message described a “harmless e-mail with a PowerPoint presentation (life is beautiful. pps)” though warned that it was a virus capable of stealing e-mail address, user name, and password. What lent it some credibility (in his sister’s eyes at least) was that she’d had two copies apparently from Microsoft and Norton.
I’m not sure that the warning is real. I checked on the Norton web site and there was no reference to this “Virus”. What makes me cautious is that Microsoft do not usually issue warnings on individual viruses. My own feeling is that this is one of those “The sky is falling in” emails that get sent from time to time just to see how fast it spreads. Do you know of any web sites where you can check this sort of thing out?
There’s a web site where you (and Chicken Little) can do just that. It’s Hoaxbusters run by the U.S. Department of Energy. Sure enough, the “Life is beautiful” hoax e-mail dates from May 2002. Here are four other reliable places: Symantec, McAfee, Sophos and Virus Bulletin.
If you receive any virus warnings, don’t pass them on. (Hey…you are running anti-virus software, aren’t you?)
