Instant Message worm

I've been fortunate, and haven't really had any problems with security viruses or worms over the years (knock word) - it's one of the perks of using a Mac over the PC. (I should mention here that even though I use a Mac, I still think that it is important to be cautious. I run Norton AntiVirus on my computer, and it occassionally does find some buggy files.)

However, I just read about a new type of worm that has been released over the past couple of days.

Instead of using email to send around a virus, it sends a link to people in your Instant Message address book. If you had received the worm, and it infected your computer, the virus could spread by sending out Instant messages to all of your IM buddies, making it look like a message sent by you. It's similar to email viruses, but people are much more suspect of opening attachments or links sent via email these days.

I probably wouldn't have thought much about this (being a Mac user, and all...) but I did receive an IM from my friend, Martin today. It contained two lines. The first was along the lines of: "This is funny - you should see this", and the the second line was a link. Since I hadn't heard of this virus technique before today, I clicked on the link to a url that ended with a .pif file. Luckily, it came up as a broken page, meaning the page had been pulled down, and the worm no longer is operational from that link.

I IM'ed with Martin later on, and he explained the virus to me. He had received an IM from a friend earlier, clicked on the (virus) link, and it in turn sent out IMs to people in his contact list.

So the moral of this story is: be careful out there. We're trained to no open links or attachments in our email, but now it seems important to be careful what links or attachments you open over IM programs as well.

Be warned.