a grain of salt

[Guest guest]

Everybody is familiar with the newest virus, the " love " virus, which

recently wreaked havoc in e-mail land. Remember the " " virus? They

both have one thing in common, and that is to do as much damage as fast as

possible by e-mailing themselves to everybody in your address book. Sound

familiar? It should, because that is exactly what these e-mails which

exhort you to " SEND THIS TO EVERYBODY YOU KNOW " are trying to do on a much

less technological basis.

The goal of the love/melissa type virus programmers is to reach critical

mass. If a program can self-replicate fast enough, it could overwhelm

e-mail systems world-wide. It's possible, and it would make one hell of a

mess that would take time to recover from. For the less technologically

inclined there is the " SEND THIS TO EVERYBODY YOU KNOW " e-mail. It's the

computer world's equivalent of graffiti. Instead of spray paint, these

punks use words to attempt to get you to propagate their graffiti to

" EVERYONE YOU KNOW!!!! " . They prey on greed and fear, and occasionally on

good human nature.

There may be little we can do to protect ourselves from the determined

efforts of a hacker intent on achieving critical mass with his or her

self-replicating e-mail virus. Staying alert and informed helps, as does a

good anti-virus program. But we can do everything to stop the spread of

this e-graffiti by just deleting it when we see it. If you think something

has merit, check it out before you send it to everybody you know. If you

are even the tiniest bit suspicious that it may be bunk, then check it out!

There are many sites that list hoaxes and a simple search of the 'net will

turn up dozens of them.

'nuf said,

Lonn