Email Forward related to Osama Bin Laden Virus
When will people learn to be careful?
Not long ago I had posted “Email forwarding – All Fun and No Responsibility ?” which carried several examples where people received forwarded mails, which they in their turn forwarded again, not caring to probe if the information contained is true or not.
Today I received yet another mail which began with an extra large heading (all in CAPS) “Please read below and pass on as soon as possible.” Don’t ever do that… take time… verify the information… and then if you feel like forwarding, pass it on.
Below it was a letter with a logo and address of Australian Federal Police advising not to open attachment contained in certain email moving around the net bearing picture of Osama Bin Laden being hanged. It later says that if the attachment is opened the system will crash and cannot be fixed. All this was followed by a request to forward this mail to everyone you know “as soon as possible”. The shocking thing here was that all the content mentioned here was not in text form but in the form of a single image (this prevents the mail from being filtered by mail servers as spam are identified by checking the text content and cannot read text from images).
Now what you could have done to identify if the mail is real or spam. Check for “Australian Federal Police” on Google and you would know that www.afp.gov.au is their official site. Now fire query “site:www.afp.gov.au osama virus”, idea behind this is that if “Australian Federal Police” actually sent the mail with “forward asap” priority then the same should also be available on their site. Doing so you will get to know that no such thing was published. A page (https://www.afp.gov.au/about/publications/platypus_magazine/december_1999/terror.html), however published in 1999 contained words ‘Osama’ and ‘Virus’, but that was not the content we are searching for.
Now you can fire a generic query for “Osama Virus” and you will get to know from various pages that the mail in circulation is just a Hoax and even the authority varied in some mail (Israeli Police instead of Australian Federal Police)…
Now if yuou knew all these things will you forward the mail?
This is something interesting
should be careful regardin this…
Joel
20 Feb 08 at 5:34 pm
I’m glad I’m not the only one that thinks like this. It winds me up when people at work just forward hoaxes on constantly without running it past IT first who could at least verify it. Unfortunately these days it’s one of my bosses that does it so I just tend to bite my tongue and ignore it instead!
sarahG
20 Feb 08 at 10:49 pm
Yes indeed we just cannot that directly, not just boss but any colleague. Hope things will get better with time.
Jalaj
20 Feb 08 at 11:21 pm
The characteristics of the chain letter hoax are so easy to spot once you have seen one or two mails.
Worst virus ever
Reported by CNN/Microsoft
No cure
Send to X friends…
etc
Free iPhone
20 Feb 08 at 11:48 pm
[...] Legends I have earlier come up with two posts Email forwarding – All Fun and No Responsibility and Email Forward related to Osama Bin Laden Virus. A reliable site to get info on hoaxes is About.com: Urban [...]
Photo Quiz - Spot the Fakes « Jalaj
2 Apr 08 at 6:30 am
I got sent this email and looked it up on the net because the writing seemed too informal for the AFP to write. Will this email harm my computer?
Lilah
20 Nov 08 at 2:00 am
my friends keep on sending me forwards like this, some that are obviously fake like the bill gates turning socialist and giving away money
i just got this 1
i dont understand y they dont look it up first!!!
John Smith
22 Feb 09 at 4:18 am
[...] have been reading this blog for a long time you might be already be knowing how seriously I take forwarded mails. But this mail containing IT related jokes was little different as I grew interested in getting [...]
Google is Not Enough - TakeITlite « Jalaj P. Jha
8 Mar 09 at 7:40 am
see snopes.com and search for osama bin laden virus email and you’ll get the full report on this. ususally you can find out about the validity of most any “chain letter” email going around at this website. they are very reputable.
good luck.
madeline
23 Mar 09 at 1:19 pm
[...] a comment » I hate forwarded mails that are sent without checking the correctness of the information supplied in it. Today I got an [...]
Nimbu Pani vendors get Ice from Morgues? « Jalaj P. Jha
1 Apr 09 at 1:24 am
I can tell that this is not the first time you write about the topic. Why have you decided to touch it again?
p.s. Year One is already on the Internet and you can watch it for free.
Year One Online
20 Jun 09 at 7:54 pm