Possible MSN virus

Hi

I got a MSN message from one fo my contacts the other day, it opened in its own window even though the contact was offline, heres what it said

Speedy says:
Hey ******** check this out and vote who will win the next game and
they send you a jersey and a $250 gift card i got mine and it was so easy
http://********.yourfavtones.com

Obviously i didnt follow the link but the first lot of **** is the begging of his email address before the @ sign and the second lot of ***** is the beginning of my email address before the @ sign

I have done a bit of search on this and found nothing, has anyone heard of this, and also can anyone tell me who has the virus if attall this is a virus

Thanks

Lee H[/img]

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Comments

tiersten

It is social engineering + a bot. You get IM spam from a friend. You click on the link in there. It will try to convince you to enter your details. You enter your details and it will log in as you. It will spam your friends. Repeat.

Slowhand

The best thing you can do, if you're really unsure, is contact your friend and ask if they sent this email. Usually though, stuff like this is fake. No one is going to give you free money for sending on emails, clicking links, etc. This particular case, like many others, has a 99.9% chance of being a phishing scam.

Lee H

i asumed it was a bad idea not to follow the link, and my friend who is pretty clued up would not have fell for this either, just wondering if its a virus thats all because he doesnt want to do a full re-install

Kaminsky

Usually a good idea to goto one of the big AV sites which usually have an online scanner which you can give the pc a quick sweep when your not sure. The best best with AV is pay the money out for as best as you can get. This is one place you should never try to save money. When I got a new PC last year there was a deal running for Norton 360 so that it only cost £20 which I snapped up. Although you can never be 100% certain even with the top of the range AV, it does give you more confidence.

With the financial crisis, apparantly the web has exploded with scammers trying to cash in on people's worries so you were dead right to be cautious. The obvious blatent ones do make you laugh though. Some little muppet sitting some where thinking he is the bees knees and what comes across is so blatently obvious as more and more people are catching on to this type of thing. There will still be people who click on the "Your our 1 millionth customer - enter your bank details here so we can send you the money" links though... /sigh

There are also good spyware scanners which you can get hold of but you have to be aware that some of these are actually made by scammers trying to get rid of their competitor's scams on your PC and put their own on your pc fully. Typically you would emply 4 or 5 different ones one after the other to deal with the multitude of these things. Should easily be able to get recomendations from the folks on this site.

Action_Jackson

I accidently clicked on the link while absentmindedly trying to close the window. Mine is an IM spam and annoying as hell, it sends IM messages to people on my contact list with the same BS. I thought I killed it with Hi-Jack this but it came back.