Are They Harmful? Virus Hoaxes

Security professionals and organizations spend a lot of time researching and informing users about virus characteristics and security practices to prevent from contracting them.  All the awareness and training is enough to make most question the validity of content found on the Internet and e-mails received from various parties.  So when information pertaining to a new viruses is released and distributed we have a tendency to devote a good portion of our time learning about them.  Learning about new viruses is not such a bad thing, unless we are wasting our time learning about a virus that does not exist.

Messages containing information about viruses that do not exist and are intentionally or unintentionally circulated by users are known as virus hoaxes.  At first, they may seem harmless.  The fact of the matter is, virus hoaxes can be as costly as or more costly than a true virus.  It is has been calculated that a single virus hoax can result in monetary damages totaling $41.7 million.  In other calculations, it has been estimated that a virus hoax can cost an organization $100,000 or more (Grocott, 2001).

So how does an organization accrue monetary loses if their employees receive a virus hoax?  It’s relatively simple.  The organization will begin to lose money as soon as employees receive and begin to spend their time reading and interrupting the virus hoax message.  Money will also be lost as network resources are used to forward the message to others or delete it.  An organization’s reputation can be effected as users forward the message to others, which can also result in the organization losing money.  Last, users can become complacent as they are exposed to more and more virus hoaxes.  The increased complacency may cause users to disregard valid virus warnings and expose the organization’s network resources to malicious content (Grocott, 2001).

The best way to mitigate virus hoaxes is to educate users on identifying them.  Some of the telltale signs of a virus hoax are: Sender is not a trusted source, a warning message about a destructive virus is displayed, contains many words in all caps, instructs users to forward to everyone they know, message states a credible source issued the warning, states the virus is very severe, and/or the virus is described using simple technical terminology (Taylor, Fritsch, Liederbach, & Holt, 2011, p. 131-132).

Another way to assist with mitigating virus hoaxes is to develop and implement a virus hoax handling policy and methods to increase user awareness.  At a minimum, a virus hoax handling policy should state that emails suspected as being a virus hoax are only to be forwarded to a designated person.  Awareness for virus hoaxes can be created through the use of newsletters or regular correspondence from the IT department (Grocott, 2001).

References

Grocott, D. (2001). Virus hoaxes - are they just a nuisance? Retrieved March 8, 2015, from http://www.sans.org/reading-room/whitepapers/malicious/virus-hoaxes-nuisance-30

Taylor, R., Fritsch, E., Liederbach, J., & Holt, T. (2011). Digital crime and digital terrorism (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.