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July 25, 2008
Clickety-Quack
Dear Larry,
I accidentally clicked on an e-mail that stole my address
book and sent messages to all my friends and colleagues. It came from an old
friend that I had not seen in years. Have I been infected with a virus?
N. R.
Dear N. R.,
Well, you don’t technically have a virus, but you should try
to be more careful where and what you click! More and more of these schemes are
popping up, so much so that a new term has arisen to describe them: “social
viruses.”
Several months ago, a number of “Facebook” copycats such as
Hi5, Tagged, Ringo, and Bebo started “behaving like viruses” when, in an effort
to boost their popularity, they began automatically sending invitations to
everyone in your e-mail address book. Annoying—if not “criminal”—to say the
least. You can imagine that if even half the recipients of these e-mails
responded, invitation e-mails would quickly spam their way around the planet
several times over.
To be clear, this didn’t happen when you clicked on an e-mail.
Rather, you must have clicked the link in the e-mail from your friend that took
you to the affiliated website. Once there, you clicked along a chain of links
until the e-mails were generated and sent out under your name. Typically, these
websites will put a small checkbox on the page to enable or disable this
behavior. The problem is that by default, the box is checked. The websites count
on the fact that many computer users simply click along without really paying
attention to what they’re doing and certainly without reading the fine print!
The moral to this story is clear, and I’ve mentioned it in
this column many times: Just because you receive an e-mail from a friend or a
colleague, don’t assume the e-mail, the Internet links it contains, or the files
it has attached to it are benign. To repeat and enhance what I’ve said in the
past:
WARNING: Never, ever download a file attachment that ends with
.exe, .com, .bat, .dll, .vbs, .pif, .scr, .lnk, .dll, or .wsh, regardless of who
the e-mail is from. You should anticipate that any file such as this contains a
virus capable of rendering your computer useless.
WARNING: Never, ever click an Internet link in an e-mail
unless you absolutely know for a fact that the link is safe or that the sender
of the e-mail has personally told you that the link is safe.
So, will you heed these warnings? Unfortunately, most people
won’t bother. Of course, that’s partially what keeps people like me in business!
This is Larry Schneider, logging off.
