For Lack of a Clever Title: Internet Hoaxes

Any techno savvy individual is likely confounded by virus hoaxes and their ability to proliferate amongst internet users at such astounding rates. The vast majority of hoaxes are completely implausible and seem relatively harmless. Snopes.com provides a fairly definitive database of common hoax e-mails, even ranking them in terms of distribution or “popularity.” Among the most popular hoaxes circulating at the moment are rumors of Barack Obama’s radical Islamism (allegedly, he was sworn into office on the Qu’ran and belongs to a church that specifically excludes non-black membership), a warning that entering one’s PIN into an ATM backwards will issue a call to the local police, and a caveat against Starbucks (apparently they refused to send free coffee to G.I.’s in Iraq) (Snopes 1).
While a pretty clear-cut violation of the Boulder Pledge (Ebert 1), for the most part it appears virus hoaxes are toothless. Sure, they take up space. Sure, they end up getting recycled to the point of being infuriating. But if there’s anything genuinely frustrating about virus hoaxes it’s that people are actually craven and stupid enough to bother forwarding them. Beyond that, they’re little more than an annoyance.
Or at least, they were. However, over the past couple years, a trend has begun to form wherein hackers actually turn hoaxes into reality. The jdbgmgr.exe hoax is a prime example. In April of 2002, an e-mail instructing recipients to locate and delete a file titled “jdbgmgr.exe” began to propagate rapidly across the internet. Jdbgmgr.exe is, in actuality, Windows’ very own Java Debugger Manager, and is present on all Windows machines. While not necessarily integral to that OS’s proper functioning, jdbgmgr.exe certainly does not need to be deleted. Over the proceeding months, the hoax’s circulation numbers became astronomical. Fortunately, its actual effects in terms of inconveniencing users were negligible. That is, until a programmer decided to exploit public knowledge of the e-mail to distribute an actual virus. Like the hoax, it instructed users to search out the jdbgmgr executable. But instead of deleting it, the e-mail informed users that the file was vital to certain system operations, and instructed them to instead inspect its properties. If it appeared with a grey teddy bear icon (as it normally should) the e-mail instructed users to replace the file with an attachment to the e-mail, thus infecting their computers. Known as the Recory worm, this virus inflicted inestimable damages to thousands of users (Hoaxbusters 1).
It’s imperative that internet users become more aware of these sorts of issues. Spam and hoaxes may not seem particularly insidious, but they have a way of transmuting if ignored and allowed to fester, as exemplified by the jdbgmgr.exe fiasco.

Ebert, Roger. The Boulder Pledge. Retrieved February 10, 2008 from Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boulder_Pledge

Unkown Author. 25 Hottest Internet Legends. Retrieved February 10, 2008 from Snopes.com
http://www.snopes.com/info/top25uls.asp

Unknown Author. CIAC Malicious Code Hoax Warnings. Retrieved February 10, 2008 from the Computer Incident Advisory Capability Home Page
http://hoaxbusters.ciac.org/HBMalCode.shtml