Tonight I heard a report from Dan about an e-mail alert he received from a mutual friend of ours regarding the dreaded “Invitation” virus.
As he read the mail out loud, I knew even before looking at it myself that it was a hoax, and as he read on it only confirmed it further.
This particular letter did try a couple clever tactics to try and add a bit of credibility, such as mentioning it was from a friend at a named local police department and that the police department friend had actually checked and verified it on snopes.com, but I knew without a shadow of a doubt that it was still bogus.
Here are some tell-tale signs that stood out like a sore thumb: (see the link above for the full text of the message, minus the added stuff I mentioned in the last paragraph)
- Technical inaccuracies and gross misspellings. I haven’t seen a real virus in quite some time that tried destroying / format your whole disk, but if you have any hope of being believed that it’s actually happening now, you’ll probably want to try something more convincing than “This virus simply destroys the Zero Sector of the Hard Disc,…” (capitalization preserved to illustrate foolishness).
- The overwhelmingly repeated purpose of the message is to get you to “send it to as many of your friends as you can”. I’m seriously considering writing a mail filter that automatically trashes any messages that contain a plea to forward it to my friends; 99% of the time it’s legitimate trash, and I can live with that small false positive.
- Overly ambitious attempts to claim credibility by referencing big names: “This is the worst virus announced by CNN, it has been classified by Microsoft as the most destructive virus ever.” These type of claims immediately seal the deal for me - 100% positively hoax. CNN and Microsoft, in the rare occasions when they do publicly discuss viruses NEVER, NEVER, EVER use phrases like “worst / most destructive virus ever”.
Just a few things to keep in mind when you’re reading your mail. 