How to Catch a Virus from a Friend

There is a brilliant scheme going on, that is the shape of things to come - in terms of virus delivery. Here's how it works.

You have instant messenger. Say you stay logged in. Well, a friend of yours from your own friends list, usually the first or near the first alphabetically - will message you. He or she will say "Check out my photos from last night".

As fate would have it, the person who did this to me happened to be an understudy of Mother Teresa. And I knew him well enough to know. He would never. send. me. a . message. That said "check out my photos from last night". The last dialogue we shared, I was pretending to be the thing Pandora trapped in her box ( yes, demons can have instant messenger! it helps us pass the time!) and he was instant messaging me from just outside the box. A good friend. Know your friends well, almost to the point of their own little nuances. It will help.

So right away I was curious. Then you check the domain and lo and behold it says, hisname.ugly-photos.com - I did a domain search on ugly-photos.com and found it registered to a major Chinese spammer.

Just for fun, I clicked on the link (being that I was on a honeystation - this one I use for just such a purpose). And of course, immediately validated my IM address to the mothership. But moreover, it said I had to login to see the pictures...

Now. If you were sending photos, would you require registration of your friends? Flickr doesn't require it (as slow as it is). And my friend happened to be a computer programmer as well - he would've just posted the pictures on his own website he wrote for it, as soon as using some other picture hosting service. But to register to see your friends photos? No.

So what would happen is, you would catch a virus - if you logged into to see the photos from your friend. Be careful. This one looks like it has potential.

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