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Johnny Depp isn't dead - good security practice is

Posted on 20 Apr 2010 at 11:59

Davey Winder is dismayed as cybercriminals once again take advantage of our obsession with celebrity

It isn’t often you get to witness a malware attack evolve from its moment of conception through its prime of life and on to its inevitable death, but that’s what happened recently, and all in a few days. It started when my wife woke me on a Sunday morning, shrieking hysterically that the man she loved was dead.

Ignoring for a moment the fact that I was still alive (if not quite awake), I asked her what she meant and was told that Johnny Depp was dead – my rival, the film star had been killed in an alcohol-related car crash in France, and the internet was buzzing with the news.

She asked me to find out more, and what I found first is that Twitter was the catalyst for this news explosion, which didn’t surprise me too much. This fashionable social-networking/micro-blogging service has a well-earned reputation for breaking major news stories before the established news networks nowadays, so if there’s a coup, a riot or a natural disaster anywhere in the world, you can bet that within minutes someone will be tweeting live from its source. Traditional news services just can’t compete with this kind of on-the-spot immediacy, but they should – and sometimes do – surpass it on another quality, namely journalistic integrity.

If a person of Depp’s stature hits the top of the trending topics list at Twitter, it now becomes news and de facto truth as a direct consequence

Here’s what happened. Someone tweeted that Johnny Depp was dead, someone else tweeted details of the crash, this started a tidal wave of “RIP Johnny Depp” tweets of such extent that it quickly bubbled to the top of the trending topics list and so became news without any of the usual fact checks. The small matter of requiring some proof, or at least a balance of evidence in favour of the story, simply evaporated in a huge puff of hysterical online gossip. If a person of Depp’s stature hits the top of the trending topics list at Twitter, it now becomes news and de facto truth as a direct consequence.

Die another day

But in this case it was nothing of the kind, and I suspected as much even before I started digging online because Johnny Depp had died once before in a remarkably similar car crash, even at the same place, back in 2004 according to an online hoax that stuck in my memory. Back then some sick joker had mocked up a CNN news story (pretty badly, I might add) and published the result on his or her own website.

That story had claimed that “Johnny Depp’s car was found alongside a road outside Bordeaux, France, with the guard rail embedded deep inside the car” and quoted a tourist who arrived at the scene as seeing “a body in the car among liquor bottles”. It fooled a lot of people at the time, which is why it had stuck in my mind, but it shouldn’t have done because, as in most such phishing attempts and scams, the perpetrators were terribly lazy and careless with their preparation.

All they’d done was paste one image on top of another, fake over genuine, without either inspecting the result or taking time to do a decent collage job. Had they done either they’d have noticed how the story jumped from the final paragraph about Johnny Depp straight into another concerning the rescue of a caving expedition group that had got into trouble. Since the chances of Johnny Depp dying twice in the same fake accident were rather remote, it took me all of ten minutes to dismiss this “news story” as nothing more than a regurgitated hoax.

Ironically, the news story then became that Johnny Depp isn’t dead, such is the way of things now. I’ll admit to playing my own part in this process, as I was one of the first to hit the online feeds with an item bearing precisely that headline, setting out the case as to why it was a hoax. There was no doubt in my mind that the real story was how we urgently need to stop treating Twitter as a real-time version of the News at Ten, and to start treating it more like a group of people gossiping in a pub, complete with Chinese Whispers-style progressive degradation of accuracy.

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