Paul Ducklin reports a curious chain mail currently circulating: see Facebook shock – site to close for maintenance at end of February?
He compares it to the old “Internet spring cleaning” family of jokes/hoaxes. And indeed, the fact that the dates given for this event don’t actually exist (29th-31st 2011) do suggest that this isn’t intended to be taken too seriously. His point, though, is that people seem to be passing it from one set of eyes to another without actually engaging brain long enough to parse it, which is indeed not a Good Thing.
A kind of social media equivalent to heterogeneous malware transmission (HMT), perhaps, where malware is transmitted irrespective of its ability to execute on a system it transits, often because the replicative mechanism is the user. But I’m sure none of my readers need reminding to engage brain before applying pressure to keyboard/keypad/mouse button/trackerpad.
Hmm. That reminder would have been much terser in the early days of the internet…
David Harley CITP FBCS CISSP
Small Blue-Green World
ESET Senior Research Fellow
[...] the end of February and the beginning of March (yes, you did read that right: see the hoax post Chainmail for the Calendar-Deprived), there’s more bad news for FB [...]
By: The Death of Facebook. Again. « Check Chain Mail and Hoaxes on April 8, 2011
at 2:22 pm