Bill Gates Email Hoax Tops the Charts

The series of Bill Gates email chain letters is topping the charts as the most prevalent

scam on the Internet, choking corporate in-boxes, clogging bandwidth and causing headaches

for IT managers.

The Bill Gates email has a string of variants, some going back several years and a few brand

new ones just going out in the wild, according to Sophos, Inc., a security and anti-virus

company based in Lynnfield, Mass. One variant of the email chain letter claims that Gates,

chairman of Microsoft Corp., is teaming up with British Airways to give away free plane

tickets to anyone who forwards the email to 10 or more people. A more recent variant claims

that Gates himself will pay $245 for every person you forward it to.

“It’s obviously just nonsense,” says Chris Belthoff, a senior security analyst with

Sophos. “Even though they seem benign, the downside of these hoaxes is that they’re a

productivity issue, and a network and bandwidth issue. They end up being the bane of most IT

managers.”

Dan Woolley, a vice president at network security company SilentRunner, says no matter how

long hoaxes have been around, people keep falling for them — and they continue to be an IT

problem.

”What’s so funny is that there are still so many people who will send this around,” says

Woolley. ”I got one on my home system from a top-level security guy. He sent it to 30 or 40

people. People are just gullible. I don’t understand why they fall for it, but they do.”

And Woolley adds that they’re sending them around to a lot of people.

”You open up your mailbox and think, ‘Well, let me send this one to 15 or 20 people.’, says

Woolley. ”That affects productivity, especially when people start responding to it.”

Stopping these hoaxes from wasting time and network space is a matter of employee education,

says Tony Magallanez, a systems engineer at F-Secure Inc., a data security and anti-virus

company.

”It’s an ongoing process,” he says. ”Human education is always an ongoing process. People

in the workplace are learning that these are hoaxes and they’re unreliable.”

But analysts generally agree that it’s IT’s responsibility to make sure employees are

learning these lessons — about hoaxes, email fraud, identity theft or spam.

”Educate people that any email that encourages forwarding is not legitimate,” says Sophos’

Belthoff. ”It’s either a hoax, or a virus or both… The biggest key is user education. IT

departments need to take an active role in somehow ensuring that there is education. In the

end, it will only make their jobs easier.”

RELATED NEWS AND ANALYSIS

• Ethics and Artificial Intelligence: Driving Greater Equality

  FEATURE |  By James Maguire,
  December 16, 2020

• AI vs. Machine Learning vs. Deep Learning

  FEATURE |  By Cynthia Harvey,
  December 11, 2020

• Huawei’s AI Update: Things Are Moving Faster Than We Think

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  December 04, 2020

• Keeping Machine Learning Algorithms Honest in the ‘Ethics-First’ Era

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  November 18, 2020

• Key Trends in Chatbots and RPA

  FEATURE |  By Guest Author,
  November 10, 2020

• Top 10 AIOps Companies

  FEATURE |  By Samuel Greengard,
  November 05, 2020

• What is Text Analysis?

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  November 02, 2020

• How Intel’s Work With Autonomous Cars Could Redefine General Purpose AI

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 29, 2020

• Dell Technologies World: Weaving Together Human And Machine Interaction For AI And Robotics

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 23, 2020

• The Super Moderator, or How IBM Project Debater Could Save Social Media

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 16, 2020

• Top 10 Chatbot Platforms

  FEATURE |  By Cynthia Harvey,
  October 07, 2020

• Finding a Career Path in AI

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  October 05, 2020

• CIOs Discuss the Promise of AI and Data Science

  FEATURE |  By Guest Author,
  September 25, 2020

• Microsoft Is Building An AI Product That Could Predict The Future

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 25, 2020

• Top 10 Machine Learning Companies 2021

  FEATURE |  By Cynthia Harvey,
  September 22, 2020

• NVIDIA and ARM: Massively Changing The AI Landscape

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 18, 2020

• Continuous Intelligence: Expert Discussion [Video and Podcast]

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By James Maguire,
  September 14, 2020

• Artificial Intelligence: Governance and Ethics [Video]

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By James Maguire,
  September 13, 2020

• IBM Watson At The US Open: Showcasing The Power Of A Mature Enterprise-Class AI

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 11, 2020

• Artificial Intelligence: Perception vs. Reality

  FEATURE |  By James Maguire,
  September 09, 2020