Thursday, February 17, 2005

Almost asleep.. then.. Virus strikes!

Yup, I almost disconnected when two of my friends in MSN messenger sent this to me and disconnected immediately.

wtf.... http://members.home.nl/marnixstaal/handcuffs.pif :-D

WARNING: Please don't follow the link above. It's a VIRUS


Well, I almost clicked on the link. What happens is, when you click on the link, you will be downloading a self executable file (just like .exe files). While downloading the file doesn't do any harm, running it does. If I am not mistaken, once you run it, you will be spreading the same message to your MSN contacts, hence spreading the virus! There are other havocs in your pc too, but I am not sure what they are.

Anyway, what happens behind this is, virus always capitalise on common folk's curiosity and sexuality. Well, some variations of this virus have a description that it's a picture of a handcuffed girl. I think if a guy is computer illiterate and think from his lower part, he would have been fooled into downloading it.

Well, here I wish to share a few rules of thumb:

1. When your friend tries to send you a file through MSN, Yahoo messenger or other IM applications, confirm with him / her before you proceed.

2. Picture files never ends with .pif, dude! The common extensions of pictures online are only .gif, .jpg, and .png. I think many people must have confused that pif stands for "pics". Nope, there's only .pic extension which is nearly obsolte now, and .pif stands for Program Information File, a kind of MS-DOS extension.

3. Never accept files transferred online which ends with .scr, .pif, .vbs! Apart from that, always practice precaution while transferring files that end with .exe, .doc, .xls, .dot etc, they may contain virus if your friend is already infected. Make sure you scan these files before opening them.

4. Last but not least, if possible, dump IE for a safer and more convenient browser! Follow this article for the reason and rationale behind it.


p/s: For those who are infected with this virus and need to find the remedy, google for handcuffs.pic removal. There are a few informative links, one of them is this one.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Err...sorry for the inconvenience. I just woke up when i noticed my friend sent me the link, and I dint really notice that it is a virus and opened and runned it, and then...yeah, you know what happened...the link was spread to everyone in my contact list, and then my MSN was not able to run. hmm, hope that i dint cause much inconvenience to many people...err, i think a lot of people got the virus already, either from me or other people, heck...S***, darn, i hate virus, and hate my ignorance about virus...guess that i seriously need to be more aware of it...

changyang1230 said...

No problem, Ren Jie... I bet anyone who had had a computer for at least 2 years have contracted a virus at one time or another.

Anyway, when I mentioned the guy who think from lower parts, I did not refer to you or Sherman. Just to clarify. :-D

Anonymous said...

Hmm, guess that I'm in a big trouble now. Even though I've sucessfully removed the virus, but it seems that my computer is not working well; I can't even surf the net. Darn, very "black" ar...

Hmm, you are correct in a sense. I use my lower part to think, the backside, that's why it's full of shit. :p Hahaha...err, just hope that my comp will function as usual, i've been scanning the virus for the whole last night and this morning...Sigh~ computer illiterate suffers!!!!!