Mind Wars Attack of the Memes

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Mind Wars:- Attack of the Memes
Copyright Martin Overton, IBM, All Rights Reserved
Mind Wars:
Attack of the Memes
Martin Overton, IBM, UK
(EMEA IT Security –Anti-Malware Specialist)
Email:
overtonm@uk.ibm.com
WWW:
Tel:
+44 (0) 2392 563442
Abstract:
Memes are contagious ideas, all competing for a share of our mind in a kind of Darwinian selection.
Many hoaxes and their kin are Memes which are now commonly spread via e-mail and web sites.
They are at the very least a nuisance, and in many companies they are causing major problems with
wasted bandwidth and lost productivity.
No matter how silly a hoax is, it still hits the support and infrastructure budget. Magnify this by the
number of different hoaxes, urban legends and scams that are circulating within a company at any one
time, now add the cost of trying to counter it, and the problem becomes more focused and expensive.
This paper will look at common Memes spread via e-mail and ways to counter them and get your staff
back to work instead of wasting their time (and your money) propagating them.
It will also endeavour to answer the following questions:
·
How do I get my staff to stop sending hoaxes, etc. around?
·
How do I stop or minimise their penetration within my company and manage them when they
do get in?
·
How can virus hoaxes, other hoaxes, chain letters, etc. be successfully defused?
·
What other resources, sites should I use?
This paper was written for, and presented at the Open University: Combating Vandalism in Cyberspace
conference at the OU in Milton Keynes on March 4th 2004.
 Mind Wars:- Attack of the Memes
Copyright Martin Overton, IBM, All Rights Reserved
Introduction
"You can fool all of the people some of the time. You can fool some of the people all of the time.
But you can't fool all of the people all of the time."
Who would you think was the original author of the above quotation?
How many of you would say
: P.T. Barnum
? I bet a fair percentage of you did?
It appears, though, that he was not the ‘originating source’. This quote has been attributed to none
other than Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
1
. This is just a small example of how many of us take
things at face value, without questioning the validity or the credentials of the person/company or other
source.
"In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true
either is true or becomes true." - John Lilly
I don’t know about you but I used to spend more time debunking and dealing with hoaxes than
dealing with real viruses. Please note the past tense, as this is not the case now, how this state of
affairs was turned around is revealed in this paper.
"A rumour without a leg to stand on will get around some other way." - John Tudor
However, it seems that it is true that many companies and organisations are suffering far more from
hoaxes, scams and other EE than real virus outbreaks. The quote below seems to sum up the current
sate of affairs:
“At CIAC, we find that we spend much more time de-bunking hoaxes
than handling real virus and Trojan incidents.”
The problem has got somewhat worse over the last eighteen months or so, as we have started to see
malware that does what we always told our end-users couldn’t be done, and now they are starting to
doubt both the Anti-Virus software and your companies own internal security staff.
So, realistically, what can we do to try and reverse this trend, or to at least manage it in a more
streamlined way?
Most of (if not all) the classes covered below are considered to be 'meme viruses', that is roughly
translated as ‘viruses of the mind'. EE’s rely on suggesting, fooling, or programming the recipient to
get them pass the EE on to others, who do the same, ad nauseum!
Why call them ‘viruses of the mind’ or meme viruses? When the Good Times hoax first erupted on to
the internet Clay Shirky stated:
‘It’s for real. It’s an opportunistic self-replicating e-mail, which tricks its host into replicating it.
Sometimes adding as many as 20,000 copies at a go. It works by finding hosts with defective
parsing apparatus which prevents them from understanding that a piece of e-mail which says there
is an e-mail virus and then asking them to re-mail the message to all their friends is the virus itself
’
[JK97]
.
Which I think you will agree sums the problem up rather well, as does the quote below:
“Once created, a virus of the mind gains a life independent of its creator and evolves
quickly to infect as many people as possible. – Richard Brodie”
[RB]
1
See Bartlett’s
for evidence.
 Mind Wars:- Attack of the Memes
Copyright Martin Overton, IBM, All Rights Reserved
Definitions
Before I outline the some of the things you can do to help yourselves, I think that it would be a good
idea to look at the different classes of EE and see how they work. Let’s look at the definitions first.
Ephemera
Things of short-lived relevance, transitory, fleeting, temporary nature.
Electronic Ephemera
The group (Genus) name for the all the distinct classes of EE, such as Hoax, Urban Legend, Scam,
Spoof, Chain Mail, etc. All of these are only considered species of EE if they are sent/received
electronically.
Meme
Pronunciation:
'mEm
2
:
an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture
3
Memes (pronounced Meem) are the basic building blocks of our minds and culture, in the same way
that genes are the basic building blocks of biological life. Richard Dawkins
[RD]
(an Oxford zoologist)
has been credited with first publication of the concept of meme in his 1976 book
The Selfish Gene.
Memes are contagious ideas, all competing for a share of our mind in a kind of Darwinian selection.
As memes evolve, they become better and better at distracting and diverting us from whatever we'd
really like to be doing with our lives. They are a kind of Drug of the Mind.
Memetics is the study of Memes, which is described as:
“Memetics is extending Darwinian evolution to include culture. There are several exciting
conclusions from doing this, one of which is the ability to predict that ideas will spread not because
they are "good ideas", but because they contain "good memes" such as danger, food and sex that
push our evolutionary buttons and force us to pay attention to them”
4
Hoaxes
[Hoaxfaq]
Here's the entries from various dictionaries:
Hoax \Hoax\, n. [Prob. contr. fr. hocus, in hocus-pocus.] A deception for mockery or mischief; a
deceptive trick or story; a practical joke. --Macaulay.
OR
Hoax \Hoax\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Hoaxed; p. pr. & vb. n. Hoaxing.] To deceive by a story or a trick, for
sport or mischief; to impose upon sportively. --Lamb.
OR
hoax n : deliberate trickery intended to gain an advantage [syn: fraud, fraudulence, dupery, put-on] v :
subject to a hoax [syn: play a joke on]
So now you know!
2
3
4
From
www.memecentral.com
 Mind Wars:- Attack of the Memes
Copyright Martin Overton, IBM, All Rights Reserved
Hybrid Virus Hoax
This is a more unusual class, which includes Virus Hoaxes that contain some genuine information
amongst the usual dire warnings. An example of this class of EE would be the SULFNBK.EXE virus
hoax that appeared early in 2001, or the latest incarnation of this old EE, JDBGMGR.EXE aka ‘Little
Bear/Teddy Bear’.
Chain Letters/E-Mail
The following description is from the CIAC web site:
Chain letters and most hoax messages all have a similar pattern. From the older printed letters to the
newer electronic kind, they all have three recognisable parts:
·
A hook.
·
A threat.
·
A request.
The Hook
First, there is a hook, to catch your interest and get you to read the rest of the letter. Hooks used to
be "Make Money Fast" or "Get Rich" or similar statements related to making money for little or no
work. Electronic chain letters also use the "free money" type of hooks, but have added hooks like
"Danger!" and "Virus Alert" or "A Little Girl Is Dying". These tie into our fear for the survival of our
computers or into our sympathy for some poor unfortunate person.
The Threat
When you are hooked, you read on to the threat. Most threats used to warn you about the terrible
things that will happen if you do not maintain the chain. However, others play on greed or sympathy
to get you to pass the letter on. The threat often contains official or technical sounding language to
get you to believe it is real.
The Request
Finally, the request. Some older chain letters ask you to mail a dollar to the top ten names on the
letter and then pass it on. The electronic ones simply admonish you to "Distribute this letter to as
many people as possible." They never mention clogging the Internet or the fact that the message is a
fake, they only want you to pass it on to others.
Urban Legends
[AFU1]
An urban legend:
·
appears mysteriously and spreads spontaneously in varying forms.
·
contains elements of humour or horror (the horror often "punishes" someone who flouts society's
conventions).
·
makes good storytelling.
·
does not have to be false, although most are. ULs often have a basis in fact, but it's their life
after-the-fact (particularly in reference to the second and third points) that gives them particular
interest.
Urban folklore is not restricted to events that supposedly happened in urban areas.
Mind Wars:- Attack of the Memes
Copyright Martin Overton, IBM, All Rights Reserved
Jokes and Spoofs
The following are definitions of a joke and a spoof:
Joke
5
Pronunciation:
'jOk
Function:
noun
1 a
:
something said or done to provoke laughter;
especially
:
a brief oral narrative with a climactic
humorous twist
b
(1)
:
the humorous or ridiculous element in something (2)
:
an instance of jesting
:
c
:
PRACTICAL JOKE
2
:
something not to be taken seriously
:
a trifling matter <consider his skiing a
joke
-- Harold
Callender> -- often used in negative construction <it is no
joke
to be lost in the desert>
Spoof
6
Pronunciation:
'spüf
Function:
transitive verb
Etymology:
Spoof,
a hoaxing game invented by Arthur Roberts died 1933 English comedian
Date: 1889
1
:
DECEIVE
,
HOAX
2
:
to make good-natured fun of
Scams
Scam
7
Pronunciation: 'skam
Function:
noun
Etymology: origin unknown
Date: 1963
: a fraudulent or deceptive act or operation <an insurance scam>
By far the most widespread scam with the most variants seen, is the ‘undying’ Nigerian Money Scam.
I have received several dozen variants of the Nigerian Money Transfer scam already this year.
However, Nigeria is not the only country mentioned, Sierra-Leone, Ivory Coast, etc. You can find
most of these variants listed at:
(137 variants listed
as at 6/9/01).
5
6
7
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