- This topic has 6 replies, 6 voices, and was last updated 18 years, 11 months ago by
.
-
Posts
-
Just an FYI:
I had something weird happen to me this past week. I tried to enter a chat room and my hard drive was going nuts. Lag was terrible (worse than normal). My firewall doesn’t help with chat room entry, but I think it’s more a Yahoo issue than my firewall.
I bailed out of the chat room and ran yahoo anti-spy, assuming it was spyware. It showed that someone was sending a trojan out using icq flooding. I thought YTunnel was supposed to prevent that and I’m running McAfee antivirus with its shield activated.
Anti-spy killed the virus and I did a complete scan of my system. I was lucky; it found nothing, although McAfee didn’t do anything when the flooding occurred.
Just a warning to all of you chatters out there. Pay attention to what your system is doing when you are in chat. It could save you from a lot of heartburn.
The lagging and trouble entering into chat rooms is strictly a Yahoo chat server issue. Y!Tunnel won’t help nor prevent Yahoo server issues like that. It’s strictly up to Yahoo.
I’m not sure how you could get a virus through Yahoo, unless it was through a file transfer. If so, I suggest giving the alternative enhancement program YTK a spin, as it has a feature to block malicious file types. 🙂
Hope this helps. 🙂
ICQ users cannot pm’s or send virii to yahoo users as it uses oscar aol protocol and different servers.
It may have got on your pc some other way.
Also be careful on what you download in chat and IM’s.
Yahoo servers are acting up lately and login is very slow to rooms.
Just FYI: There are people in chat rooms asking people for their e-mail address so they can send them pictures. These really do look like picture files and even looks like a preview of a picture in your email; however, if you look at the file extension it is .scr (screen saver) which are able to execute code.
After opening the file, the file will delete it’s self after installing a trojan on your computer. I don’t trust files from anyone including friends since you don’t know if my friends have been hacked to get to me. Just use some common sense and you should be ok.
It’s a scary internet out there.
Well,
Rules Number 1: IF you don’t know the person personally, NEVER ACCEPT any files from them.
Rules Number 2: Always SCAN any files that you recieved from Internet.
Rules Number 3: NEVER click any links that posted on any chat room (Yahoo, Paltalk, MSN, ect).
Rules Number 4: NEVER use Internet if you don’t know how to control yourself.
I have been a pc pro for 25 years so I know all the rules for avoiding viruses and run mcafee antivirus and firewall. I get regular updates to both. I also get regular windows xp updates. This attack happened when i tried to enter a chat room. i figured it would save someone’s computer from being trashed.
Clicking on links in chat rooms and PMs are definitely a heavily abused conduit for spreading malware (viruses and worms included). The most common avenue used to spread these is through file transfers by either disguising a rogue file as harmless (file extension tricks and other) or by social engineering to achieve the file(s) being directly executed (or loaded through a helper application) by the end user after the transfer’s complete.
There is software on the market that can and does filter and block out suspicious applications by monitoring file-over-im transfers and one of them, as Venom already noted, is one of my applications (YTK Pro). File Transfer Type Screening (FTTS) is a part of YTK Pro and what this does is it allows you to globally (from strangers AND friends/safe list users) block the establishment of file transfers containing file types that are known to be ‘dangerous’ or abused frequently to cause harm to your computer. Preloaded defaults span over 25 different file types ranging from office documents to scripts (visual basic and javascript) to executables (.exe, .bat, .com, .pif, .scr etc) with the added ability of adding/deleting your own custom file extensions.
Having software at your disposal to keep the more dangerous ones away can definitely help to keep you from becoming the next DDoS irc bot in someone’s botnet army.
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.