include the benefits and over head. According to the policenotebook on virus hoaxes, most alerts a person receives on virus are in fact false. Also it states that millions of dollars are lost annually because of the diversion from their work and companies spend more money on virus detection programs. They suggest that before you start taking action to check with someone you trust or check it out yourself to make for sure that it is a real threat. The other types of hoaxes include malicious code (virus and trojan) warning, urban myths, giveaways, inconsequential warnings, sympathy letters and requests to help someone, threat chains, scam chains.The malicious code warning are very numerous there are many sites that a person can go to research and find out whether or not they have received an actual or fake warning. Some of this sites include the CIAC, Scambusters, and Symantec, this are just a few of the many sites out there. An example of one of these hoaxes comes from the CIAC hoaxbusters page it gives a list of the many different hoaxes. One in particular was Irina Virus hoax, “this all started when the former head of an electronic publishing company circulated the warning to create publicity for a new interactive book by the same name. The publishing company has apologized for the publicity stunt that backfired and panicked Internet users worldwide. The original warning claimed to be from a Professor Edward Pridedaux of the College of Slavic Studies in London; there is no such person or college. However, London’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies has been inundated with calls. This poorly thought-out publicity stunt was highly irresponsible (CIAC pg. 2).” What this letter said was that if u get a certain email with the subject line of “Irina” to delete the message as soon as possible because if a person were to download it the result would be a total rewrite of the hard drive. This ...
