Every day after school, Jesse would talk to his friends online with instant messenger. His parents often checked his buddy list to make sure he only talked to people he knew in real life. They also set up the program so he could only download files from people in his buddy list. "Our main concern was that he didn't talk to any weirdos online," Jesse's father tells us.
While they were chatting, Jesse and his friends would send each other links to cool Web sites, pictures from school events, and music files. Sometimes though, Jesse would get links that opened up blank pages, pictures that looked garbled, or music files that wouldn't play. When he asked his friends about it later, they didn't know what he was talking about.
It turns out that Jesse's friends had never sent those links. The strange messages were actually coming from hackers who faked his friends' screen names, and the files and links were installing malware on his machine. Eventually, there was so much malware on Jesse's computer that it slowed to a crawl and became unusable. What do his parent's say now? "We told him to be more careful - to check with his friends on the phone before he downloads anything. The next time he downloads a virus, it's no IM for a month!"
To learn how to protect yourself from malware when instant messaging, see Community - Malware
Print view
Email to a friend
Submit to Reddit
Save to del.icio.us
Submit to Digg.com
Stumble It!