Security For All

Just in time for Halloween is this article by Alice LaPlante in InformationWeek, 7 Fantastic Internet Hoaxes. The really scary thing about this list of hoaxes is that I remember almost all of them. You can read Alice’s original article to get the details but a summary list is provided for your convenience.

Test your internet savviness or suckerness (just like in the womens magazines!). How many do you remember? Variants count.

7. Bigfoot Captured!
Last August a Bigfoot hunting group lit up the Internet with claims it had found the 500-lb. body of Sasquatch in the woods of northern Georgia.

6. Snowball, the Giant Mutant Cat of Ontario
This photo of a man holding a giant (supposedly 87 pounds) cat first appeared on the Internet in April 2000. An e-mail that wove a story around the photo began circulating a year later. The cat’s purported owner, a Roger Degagne, supposedly found Snowball as a kitten near a nuclear power plant in Chalk River, Ontario, Canada — the implication being that toxic waste had caused its grotesque size.

5. The Last Tourist
Within a month of Sept. 11, a photograph began circulating the Internet that supposedly showed a tourist on top of the World Trade Center right before one of the terrorist-piloted planes hit.

4. Good Times Virus
This is just one example of a whole category of hoaxes, known as “virus hoaxes,” which warn about the dangers of a particular piece of malware with the potential to wreak irreparable damage on users’ computers. This particular virus was supposed to be attached to an e-mail message with the subject heading “Good Times,” that if opened, would rewrite the recipient’s hard drive and result in other disastrous scenarios, many of which were technically unfeasible.

3. Bill Gates’ Millions Giveaway
This hoax, which appeared in early 2001, claimed that Bill Gates of Microsoft was conducting a beta test of new software and would send money to all those who forwarded the message to others.

2. Petition to Ban Religious Broadcasting
This, like so many chain-letter hoaxes, has mutated over the years. It started out in 1996 claiming that the atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair, who brought the lawsuit that led to the Supreme Court decision to ban prayer from public schools, was petitioning the FCC to ban all religious programming. It then spawned other chain letters asserting that atheists were attempting to forbid Christmas music in public places and remove references to God from popular television shows like Touched by an Angel.

1. Save Amanda Bundy
This chain letter has been in circulation since as early as 1997, and falls into a general category of “sympathy” hoaxes. There are a large number of variations of this letter in circulation, and many of them reference a sentimental poem “Slow Dance,” supposedly written by this young girl who is dying of cancer.

So how did you do? Check out your score for fantastic prizes! Okay so there’s no prizes, but check anyway.

If you can recall:

0: Newcomer. I’m surprised that you found your way to this blog post. Let me be the first to welcome you to the internet.

1 – 3: Experienced. Just wait, you’ll get to see them all. Probably before this time next year. This stuff just keeps getting recycled over and over again.

7: Cynical. Clearly you are mistaken since everyone knows that #3 is true. I’m waiting for my money right now.

If you know of any clever hoaxes – or want to start one – feel free to comment here. We’ll see what we can do to get into Snopes without litigation or prosecution.

And if you know Bill Gates – or if you are Bill Gates (hey, it could happen) – could you find out what happened to my money? I forwarded that email to 100 people just like the message said to do. I’ll bet those darn atheists took it to finance their effort to ban religious broadcasting.