Hoax Info from ionanet

This is NO hoax!

Jesus Is Lord!!

With the astronomical growth of ionanet, our e-mail has assumed gigantic proportions... and attracted a fair number of kooks. So, we're now getting more hoax and chain letter e-mail. Although normally cautious about forwarding such mail, I fell for the Women in Afghanistan petition and dutifully sent it on the more unsuspecting souls.

Christians tend to fall easy prey for hoaxers because believers want to show Christ's love to others, want to pray, want to help, etc. But, friends, we are NOT helping when we forward hoax mail to our friends and mailing lists! We are perpetrating a scam.

While many hoaxes are just time and space wasters, some are malicious attacks on innocent companies or individuals. Don't be drawn in. Check out those e-mails before spreading this poison. There are some links to hoax debunker sites on the right, and here are some telltale signs to watch for....

Be on guard if the e-mail starts something like this...

"Important, don't delete..."
"Sign this petition and forward..."
"I don't usually read these but I know the person who sent this..."
"Urgent, please forward to everyone you know..."
"Send this to all your prayer groups..."

The U.S. Department of Energy's Computer Incident Advisory Capability, CIAC is the official governmental agency to deal with viruses, hoaxes, and other computer hacking vulnerabilities. Please regard ALL virus warning emails as suspect unless verified by this authority. The following website contains a complete and accurate listing of all "hoaxes." Please do not send out/forward any virus warning email without first consulting this list and the list of viruses also found via the CIAC home page.

These all open in a new window

Some Old E-mail Scams Forwarded to us by Christians:

Snopes

CIAC

TruthOrFiction.com

Click below to...

CIAC Tells How to Identify a Hoax

There are several methods to identify virus hoaxes, but first consider what makes a successful hoax on the Internet. There are two known factors that make a successful virus hoax, they are: (1) technical sounding language, and (2) credibility by association. If the warning uses the proper technical jargon, most individuals, including technologically savvy individuals, tend to believe the warning is real. For example, the Good Times hoax says that "...if the program is not stopped, the computer's processor will be placed in an nth-complexity infinite binary loop which can severely damage the processor...". The first time you read this, it sounds like it might be something real. With a little research, you find that there is no such thing as an nth-complexity infinite binary loop and that processors are designed to run loops for weeks at a time without damage.

When we say credibility by association we are referring to who sent the warning. If the janitor at a large technological organization sends a warning to someone outside of that organization, people on the outside tend to believe the warning because the company should know about those things. Even though the person sending the warning may not have a clue what he is talking about, the prestige of the company backs the warning, making it appear real. If a manager at the company sends the warning, the message is doubly backed by the company's and the manager's reputations.

Individuals should also be especially alert if the warning urges you to pass it on to your friends. This should raise a red flag that the warning may be a hoax. Another flag to watch for is when the warning indicates that it is a Federal Communication Commission (FCC) warning. According to the FCC, they have not and never will disseminate warnings on viruses. It is not part of their job.

What an E-mail Borne Virus Can and Cannot Do

A virus like program can not spread in an e-mail message. While an infected program could be attached to an e-mail message, the e-mail message itself cannot contain one in any form that could be executed.

A virus or Trojan horse program can not infect a system by simply being read. The current mail readers do not execute an e-mail message, they display it on the screen for you to read. You must take care when downloading an attachment to an e-mail message. In some mail readers you can double click on the attachment icon to have it extracted and opened by whatever program created it. If that attachment is a program, it is downloaded and run, and running any program you have not scanned could cause you to be infected with a virus.

I have now deleted the Art4Christ site. Get Free Graphics here.
The Handmaidens site is still up but no longer active.
This is also true of the Web4Christ and Host4Christ sites.