For example, the Michelangelo virus in 1992 was the first real virus scare. The whole world panicked based on media reports. What happened was, thousands of people updated their virus protection, then nothing really bad happened. It was good that the media informed people, but it was bad that they improperly set expectations. One of the more common misperceptions by computer users is the main aspect of a virus is to be destructive.
People think viruses do widespread destruction of computer hardware.
NakedWife is different from most viruses because it has the potential to delete several system files essential to the operating system, but it will not destroy hardware. The combined weight of these misperceptions has created a public that attributes a wide variety of problems to viruses, said Orbuch, and in many of these cases, the bugs are blameless. Or they go to a computer store and pay a lot of money to have a non-existent virus cleaned. The public demonstrates its misunderstanding of the dangers of viruses by the mass forwarding of virus chain letters, said Orbuch. A virus does most of its damage by overloading e-mail servers, not direct damage to people's computers, but the same effect can be created when someone receives a virus warning that is a hoax.