This weekend I received an innocent looking Facebook e-mail from a friend of mine who is also an I.T. professional. The e-mail within Facebook invited me to view a Youtube video. I have gotten several before from other people I trusted and so I thought it was safe to click on this link. Once I clicked on the link it took me to a fake Youtube website and prompted me to install an updated version of Flash Player to view the video. I clicked on this link and found out that the website was trying to install a trojan virus onto my computer via the fake Flash Player update. Norton Internet Security Suite blocked the install and thanks to it I am safe. I should know better than to click on links like that and I am fortunate that I am not spending hours on either cleaning the computer from a virus infection or wiping the drive and reinstalling all those applications again.
I did some research on Snopes and on Symantec Threat website and apparently there are several variations of this trojan circulating on Facebook and it has been since January of 2010 or maybe even longer than that. One of the programs that gets installed is a keylogger program that steals your information and sends it back to a host that is capturing the information to be used at a later date.
Be safe on the Internet and protect yourself with good Anti Virus and Anti Spyware software and make sure you do regular scans and regular updates for those applications. It will help to keep all of us safe and clean from infections and allow us to use our computers for both fun and work productivity.
Posts
1 comment:
Thanks so much for sharing. I always have protection but my neighbor did not and had 23 differnt virus and had to get someone to clean his computer.
Post a Comment