Common Hoaxes
Popup Advertisements
Many advertisement agencies use a cheap little trick to lure you into giving them personal information: pop-ups. Often times, pages we view are filled with pop-up / pop-under advertisements that promise money, or certain prizes, for “shooting the monkey” or the more recent (and quite creative) “shooting the terrorist” on a flash advertisement. Actually, it’s not whether you hit the monkey or not – either way, you are still redirected to the same page – it’s whether you enter your e-mail address at the redirect or not. If you pay attention to the details on the registration screen, it says something similar to “By clicking here, I agree to have my inbox flooded with worthless junk mail!” I guarantee you, they aren’t lying. If they go as far as asking for your home address or phone number, I highly recommend you do not give it out. Not only will your inbox be flooded, your personal mailbox will be flooded, and you will have telemarketers calling you, completely legally (because you authorized it by clicking “I accept”) and unaffected by the National No Call List.
Bulk Mail / Spam
The spam problem is growing faster than anything else on the internet. Although ISPs are starting to take care of the problem with spam blocking features, not all of it is caught. For example, “the guy from India with 4 kids who have to go to college,” probably is a scam artist living on a private mansion on the coast of Florida. Those e-mails go around all the time. “Help! I need financial assistance! Send me money, quick!” My advice: don’t help him, because you can probably use the money more than he can.
Spyware
Although not exactly a hoax, spyware can be installed as a result of a hoax, and cause more problems than you can imagine. It is a very good idea to try your best to keep your computer spyware-free. Many spyware programs have built in key-loggers, where they monitor the keys you press, and transmit those to a remote server – often relaying passwords, and anything else you type (including your personal information). I highly recommend reading Force’s great spyware tutorial found here. It goes extremely in depth and gives you a good understanding of how spyware works.
SMTP Relays
Since some people have a hard time understanding how other people can forge e-mails, and need proof of it, here is a good example of how easily it can be done. I thought I would add a fun story that happened as an early April Fools Joke, directed at one of my close friends (it is a true story).
April Fools Joke – 2005 (Disclaimer: Kids, don’t try this at home)
About three days prior to April Fools this year, I decided to have a little fun. I had always wanted to test out a personal mail server and decided it was time give it a try (I live in Kansas, what else am I going to do when I’m bored?). I found a program that would do what I needed. I installed and initiated the program that would act as a mail server and edited a few MIME headers (the MIME header is where the “From:” “To:” “Subject:” identifiers are set).
I finally decided how I was going to play my trick. I decided to send an email to three of my friends as a test job, just to make sure I had it right, then later, send one to another friend without telling her what I was doing. The plan was to change the “from:” header so that it displayed both the name and address of the person I was sending it to. Basically, it would look as if they sent an e-mail to themselves.
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“War Games” & “Hackers: The Movie” sure did motivate a few kids to become internet security specialists. Groups formed on mIRC and it became pretty big at that time.