Please forward this email to everyone you know.....they will be grateful. There is a virus out now being sent to people via E-mail. It is considered the A.I.D.S. VIRUS of computers. It will destroy your memory, sound card and speakers, your drive and it will infect your mouse or pointing devices as well as your keyboards, making it so that you can't type and it will not register on the screen. It self-terminates only after it deletes all programs. It will come via E-mail called "(OPEN: VERY COOL!:)". DELETE IT Immediately!! Pass this on QUICKLY AND TO AS MANY PEOPLE AS POSSIBLE!! This is a new, very malicious virus and not many people know about it. This information was announced yesterday morning by Microsoft.

Yeah, so if this thing was announced by Microsoft, how come there's no link to their announcement? It's because there was no such announcement, there is no such virus, and the entire message is a hoax. At one time or another, we've all received emails like the one above. Maybe you've gone through a thought process like this: "Is this for real? Wow, if it's for real, I'd better tell my friends. Better safe than sorry..." So, you set up a forwarding message addressed to everyone in your address book and click the send button. At the moment you click that button, you have become the unwitting propagator of an email hoax. In fact, the only virus is the message itself, which does its dirty work by taking up the time of well-meaning people like us and clogging our inboxes with junk.

But how do you tell whether a warning is a hoax or legitimate? The first way to tell is that the message content itself contains several clues that should make you suspicious. The message tone is hysterical, full of ALLCAPS ADMONISHMENTS, and replete with MULTIPLE EXCLAMATION POINTS!!! There is frequently a claim that "not many people know about this", designed to make you feel responsible for helping to sound the alarm. There is typically an urgent appeal to send the message to AS MANY PEOPLE AS POSSIBLE!! And, to give the message an air of credibility, there is usually mention of some authority, such as IBM or Microsoft but -- and this is the dead giveaway for a hoax -- there is never an actual link to a legitimate source of information.

The second way to tell if a warning is a hoax is to look it up at one of the excellent websites that monitor such things. They have feelers out all over the world, and you can be confident they've heard of the hoax long before you have. Some of these websites, such as Symantec and McAffee, focus mainly on virus hoaxes. Others, such as Urban Legends and Scambusters, expose other types of hoaxes, such as the ones that have been going around the internet for years that claim congress is going to cut off all funding for the arts or tax emails by the word and you must write to your representatives immediately. I sometimes wonder if these were started by people who wanted to delegitimize the causes they purport to represent by making their advocates look foolish. Scambusters also contains information on various schemes designed to bilk you out of your hard-earned money.

Of course, there are real viruses out there, too. Always be sure that you have a good virus detection program and that you keep it up to date. Norton Anti-Virus from Symantec generally gets high ratings and probably offers protection against the most viruses. Their Live Update service makes updating easy.