As you know Snopes is used to find out about urban Legend and Rumors:
I received a Virus alert from my RSS feed about Email virus warning. It even adds a Snope URL. The Author just copies and pasted the virus warning into the blog without even going to Snopes.
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According to Snopes and I’ll quote:
Although the Postcard virus is real, it isn’t a “BIG VIRUS COMING” (it’s already been around in multiple forms for a long time now), it will not “burn the whole hard disc” of your computer, CNN didn’t classify it as the “worst virus” ever, and it doesn’t arrive in messages bearing a subject line of ‘Invitation.’[Via Snopes]
Now as you can tell the link described in the blog post was “http://www.snopes.com/computer/virus/postcard.asp”. If you went there, you’d have seen this as a not really true and some parts of this might be but that part about burning your Hard drive or even consider the Worst virus isn’t true.
Some things you need to consider before forwarding anything is:
- Is it completely True?
- Is it Legitimate? (True blown warning about something like a product recall or something important like that)
- Does it Say to Forward? (if so it is probably not wise)
- is it from a Friend (If so you might want to remind the friend nicely that it isn’t nice to send spam)
If you follow some of these suggestions you’ll be making the Internet a far better place for everyone. Remember if you don’t know, it’s time to learn. if you do know, it is time to teach. These are the fundamental aspects of using the internet the right way. Also if it is a fake virus warning you should tell them to get a Free Anti-virus and Firewall to better protect them. Also remind them that if they keep their system updated then they shouldn’t be too worried. Remember only you can prevent a Computer Virus and it’s up to you keep your system up to date.
