Guest blog: Credit, credibility and credulousness

Time to hand over the reins again to another guest blogger. Paul Ducklin, Sophos's head of technology in Asia Pacific, discusses the recent United Airlines debacle. Over to you Paul...

Paul Ducklin

What is news? The word itself is simple: imagine that there were a noun "new", so that you could go to the shop, for example, and buy "a new" - something, anything, which isn't old, which hasn't appeared before. If you were to buy two of them, you'd have "news" - stuff which isn't old.

(These days, ironically, the noun "new" has become old, and has largely died out. You can only get news two or more at a time. And, by golly, can you get news these days. On TV, on the radio, in papers, on websites, in blogs, via email. Sometimes it might be as well if they still came singly.)

Theoretically, then, and etymologically, you can only have news once. In practice, news gets repeated for a while, after which it is forgotten, or turns into history. Certainly, if you take a news story you published six years ago, and republish it identically - whether by accident or by design - it isn't news, by definition. It's just the same story over again. It might be interesting, or even important. But it isn't news.

So it should have been nothing more than an absurdity over the weekend when a story resurfaced from 2002 telling of United Airlines filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, as indeed they did in December 2002.

Amazingly - and there are numerous accounts circulating of how this came about - this story was turned back into news, and was, apparently unsceptically, treated as both true and current by sufficiently many influential people that United's share price imploded, plummeting from around $12 to around $3 as investors sold shares in the "newly bankrupt" company. Fortunately, trading was suspended and the price later recovered to just under $11.

What can one say to this? All I can think of is, "Earth to Wall Street Investors! Earth to Wall Street Investors!"

Come on, folks! Was NO-ONE suspicious that United had filed for Chapter 11 again, and that the story written about it was EXACTLY the same as one written six years ago? Not just that the circumstances were familiar (which they would not have been), but that they were described IDENTICALLY by the SAME author? Did NO-ONE think to check the facts?

Here at Sophos, we have been warning people for years not to be credulous when they are online. (Note to Wall Street investors. Credulousness is not a positive attribute, like being credible or in credit. It means that you are inclined to believe nonsense much too easily, or to swallow stories without bothering to check up on them properly, or even at all. It's similar to what we used to call "gullibility", before that word was removed from the dictionary.)

Let's face it: people who abuse social networks (spammers, scammers, phishers, pharmers, social engineers) must be clapping their hands with glee over this. It seems that some people really will believe anything, provided that it is published on the internet in a way which makes it easy to believe. More importantly, people with investments, or access to other people's investments, really will believe anything.

So let us repeat our warning once again.

The internet is a great source of content, but you simply must double-check that content before treating it as fact. You are not being cynical if you do this. You should do it all the time.

It is far too easy for fraudsters to lead you down the garden path thanks to the ease and speed which which stories, whether true or false, can be published, indexed, aggregated, syndicated and thus, apparently, imbued with False Authority.

Think like a carpenter. Measure twice. Cut once.