e-mail hoax

Helping users to understand what hoaxes look will go along way in protecting against them. Most e-mail hoaxes (and almost all of the really successful ones) come in several recognizable categories:

The technical warning. Many successful hoaxes use highly technical language to describe a threat. The description is often complete nonsense.

The Good Samaritan ploy. Hoaxes [...]

As you learned in the previous installment of this article, educating users is one way you can reduce the threat of hoaxes. Another way, which would also cut the number of incidents that you have to respond to, is to ban user access to outside e-mail accounts from work. This is usually done via Web [...]

Hoaxes can be a major drain on an IT department’s resources. Unfortunately, many hoaxes are simply time-wasting pranks intended to make fun of novice or clueless users, but others include instructions that, if followed, will wreak havoc on a personal system or even a network. And many of the hoax e-mails that don’t contain malicious [...]