(Part 1 of my UnCommon Sense Series of rarely offered information,
opinions, and articles.)
Have you ever received or passed on a warning about an email virus? If you have, there are some things that you should be aware of – things that the people who create these warnings won’t tell you.
I used to get a
ton of email to sift through every day. (An occupational inconvenience
associated with my kind of work.
Read how I fixed this problem.) On a fairly regular basis, I used to get
warnings from well-meaning friends about the latest virus that was spreading
throughout the Internet by email.
In the vast
majority of cases, these warnings are hoaxes and clog up email systems, but in
some cases they can actually do damage by asking recipients to search for
and delete ‘viruses’ from their computer, which are in reality perfectly normal
system files.
So how do you
separate the legitimate warnings from the malicious hoaxes? Before you
forward a warning to anyone, search for key data or phrases in any of the
standard Internet search engines (e.g.
www.google.com). Several sites are devoted to debunking virus hoaxes, and
chances are very good that you will get the information you need, without
inundating your friends with scary trash.
Better yet,
you can reduce the effect of hoaxes even further by then turning around and
educating the person that sent you the warning in the first place. Please
do, and we’ll eventually make such nonsense a thing of the past. Feel free to
refer them to this link:
http://www.intellact.ca/APWelch/VirusWarnings.htm.
The foregoing is my opinion. You can send me yours by clicking here.
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