When Virus Warnings Become Their Own Viruses

This morning, the University of Calgary breathlessly released a news release titled Danger in the Internet Café.

It reports on a new computer virus that can sneak onto your computer from other infected computers via unencrypted wireless signals, like the ones typically found in Internet cafés. From there, like most viri these days, it plants adware. The only difference between this and other viruses is it spreads from computer-to-computer on unencrypted networks, not by you opening an email.

Oh, and one more thing.

It doesn’t actually exist.

News releases from universities and computer-virus software manufactures are a kind of virus unto themselves. When you cover technology, you get them all the time. The formula is the same — a provocative headline saying there’s a new threat, that everyone needs to (a) download the University’s white paper, or, (b) buy/upgrade your anti-virus software.

Somewhere, buried several paragraphs down, is the confession that the virus doesn’t actually exist; it’s actually just a hypothetical one created in a lab. (To its credit, at least the University of Calgary’s news release calls it a “potential” threat in the first paragraph.)

You’ve got to hand it to whoever wrote the news release, though. They compare the (non-existent) virus to Typhoid Mary, the first person to contract and spread typhoid fever. Typhoid fever it transmitted over the air — hence, the likeness to the potential computer virus. They even coined the phrase “Typhoid adware.” Clever.

The best part, though, is the graphic the white paper uses to explain how the virus works:

Man. That’s one mean-looking virus!

The paper Typhoid Adware can be found: http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~aycock/papers/eicar10.pdf