Hoax E-Mail May Be Worse For Business Than Viruses

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July 31, 2003 (2:26 PM EDT)

Hoax E-Mail May Be Worse For Business Than Viruses

Anti-virus software maker Sophos pays equal attention to viruses and hoaxes in its monthly top 10 report issued Thursday.

They do no measurable damage. They don't carry malicious code or payloads, but the business price tag for e-mail hoaxes may be larger than that for outright viruses, the enterprise anti-virus software maker said.

"Hoax e-mails are a major headache for IT departments," said Chris Belthoff, senior security analyst at Sophos. "They're more insidious; they prey upon weaknesses of the end-user; they panic employees over non-existent viruses."

While corporate costs of dealing with hoax-mail remain unquantified, the problem isn't going away. And some old hoaxes are coming back.

"The trend is up over last year," Belthoff said, "both for viruses and hoaxes. We showed a 17 percent or so increase in number for the first six months of the year, and that's continued through July."

Sophos's latest top 10 viruses and hoaxes list showed a chain mail promise of a share in Bill Gates's wealth to all who forwarded it taking top honors as July's most frequently forwarded hoax on enterprise mail systems.

Top virus for the month was Sobig-E, the latest variant of the long-lived Sobig worm which clocked nearly half of Sophos's top reported virus detections and nailed first place; this marked the new version's first appearance on the hit-list. The closest competitor was Bugbear-B, which came in with 11 percent of reported enterprise detections.

The difference between virus incidents and hoax reports illuminates the problem hoax mail presents to IT departments. "Popular" viruses place high on top 10 lists precisely because of the frequency with which anti-virus software detects and removes the viruses from the network.

"Most companies by now have deployed anti-virus software and update it regularly," Belthoff said. "Hoaxes get through, get forwarded throughout the system."