Jalaj P. Jha Technical & Miscellaneous Ramblings

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?