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A worm that infects Windows XP and, possibly, Vista is said to spread itself over IM applications, like AIM and Windows Live Messenger, and… BitTorrent. Security research firm Sophos says the worm uses “a social engineering scheme” to get people to unknowingly infect their computers with it.I was alarmed when I read this, as you should be. We all use instant messaging to some extent. Some at the office, some at home...some both. Thankfully, the computers at work are all protected by our own in-house managed security and monitoring system. Sadly, my computer at home is not.
It’s controlled by a remote user over IRC, and is capable of sending itself via AIM and MSN, storing itself as a file called IMG009.jpg-www.imagehosting.com inside a zip file called C:RECYCLERmyphoto.zip, and then sending this zip with a message that promises pictures, written in the same language as the infected computer. This sort of social engineering tries to maximize the chance that recipients will believe it to be legitimate and open the attachment, though this is shot in the foot somewhat by the fact that many of the the phrases have been cut off abruptly.
Which leads me to ponder: how many offices are as ill-protected as my home computer? I shudder at the thought of my C-Drive being corrupted, and I don't have much of significance on it. What if that drive had valuable business data?
It's horrible to think that somewhere, one coworker just send a virus to another because of idle cubicle-to-cubicle chatter via IMs. Sadly, that is probably the case.
I'm going to go run a virus check on my computer while wishing my computer was protected as well as my computer at work. What about you?
