When you collect your latest batch of email, the message will usually go something like this: WARNING!!!!!! If you receive an email titled "JOIN THE CREW" DO NOT open it! It will erase EVERYTHING on your hard drive! Send this letter out to as many people you can. . . this is a new virus and not many people know about it! Also, If anyone receives mail entitled; PENPAL GREETINGS! please delete it WITHOUT reading it!! This is a warning for all Internet users - there is a dangerous virus propagating across the Internet through an email message entitled "PENPAL GREETINGS!".
It's called the "Penpal" computer virus, and despite the apocalypic warning it does not exist. Your mailbox and your attention have succumbed to yet another false virus alert - a warning about a virus that lives only in the media or the public imagination. Just as there's an annual upsurge in colds and flu every autumn when the kids go back to school, October is also the wicked month for False Virus Syndrome.
This outbreak of alerts coincides with the new academic year in third-level colleges. In the past four weeks Computimes has been swamped with warnings about the "Penpal" virus. One of these panic messages to us had also been forwarded to 36 other addresses, including universities as far afield as Denmark and Hungary, the Sunday Tribune, The Irish Times, Pat Kenny's radio show and 12 separate email accounts at the Union of Students in Ireland. Virus hoaxes often make ludicrous claims - for example, that "all Internet users" are likely to be infected. But real viruses are machine specific - a virus which works on an Apple Mac's operating system won't affect an IBM-compatible!
Another key feature: the alerts appeal to "higher authorities" by suggesting that the information originated in, say, IBM. One of the most respected international experts on computer virus myths and hoaxes is Rob Rosenberger. "Many people in the computer field sound confident when they talk about computer viruses yet very few have adequate knowledge of this technically obscure subject," he argues. "Most fall prey to what some virus experts call `False Authority Syndrome', and it contributes significantly to the spread of fear and myths about computer viruses."
Admittedly, computer viruses can sometimes be dangerous. Those fragments of rogue software can range from playful to extremely destructive routines, and hundreds of real viruses are discovered each year. But false viruses such as Penpal, Irina and Good Times are a surprisingly widespread and debilitating phenomenon which breeds like, well, viruses. The Internet is a perfect incubation zone for them, alongside other urban myths such as the poor schoolboy with the "incurable" brain tumour who wanted postcards, or the US modem tax, or the Neiman Marcus cookie recipe. (No, we're not going to repeat them yet again). The myths are good examples of what English biologist Richard Dawkins calls a "meme", a term he coined two decades ago to describe the basic unit of replicating ideas.
"Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches," he wrote in The Selfish Gene. "Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain. . ."
False viruses have even spawned some spoof false virus alerts, such as the one which warns: Subject: "Free Money" FAKE Virus There is a computer virus that is being sent across the Internet. If you receive an email message with the subject line "Free Money", DO NOT read the message. DELETE it immediately, UNPLUG your computer, then BURN IT to ASHES in a government-approved toxic waste disposal INCINERATOR. Once a computer is infected, it will be TOO LATE. . .
Note how, like false viruses such as the "Good Times" one, the subject line is exactly what you are warned to be on your guard against. Joking aside, the trouble with false virus alerts is that they are very efficient memes. Like real computer viruses, they have colonised a global, highly data-rich environment. They manage to replicate themselves because:
people give too much credence to email, whatever its source or accuracy;
the alerts tap into an underlying fear of machines and networks;
people who really ought to know better don't take a few seconds to think, before embarking on the next round of Chinese whispers with dozens of other users. If you do get a virus warning message, check a reputable site about virus myths - such as Rob Rosenberger's (at www.kumite.com/myths), or the one maintained by the US Department of Energy (at www.ciac.llnl.gov/ciac/ CIACHoaxes.html).
Michael Cunningham is at: mcunningham@irish-times.ie