Monday, July 23, 2007

Live Messenger "Look at my summer pictures" worm!

I have used a lot of time educating my grandma (who is >80 years old) on how to use the Internet, Live Messenger and her Webcam (Which she called me last summer to request "Can I also get one of those camera thingies that your children have").

Luckily she listened to me, because today she called me that she was getting strange messages from her family members on Live Messenger (Soon 24 great-grandchildren in total).

So if you receive a message from one of you Live Messenger contacts saying "look at my summer pictures http_//paulina2k8.tripod.com/summer2008.zip" then DON´T click the link.

If one of your friends downloaded the file, it will also try to do file transfers of files called "images052.zip", "photo9.zip", "album29.zip" and others to your computer (And to all of your buddies if you are stu... enough to transfer and open the file). In this case it actually also wrote "Hey, acceptera mina bilder" and other messages in Swedish from her daughter based in Sweden (We are from Denmark).

There are no hits on Live Search and only a few on Google so it´s appears to be a fairly new variant.

I actually recently wrote a security whitepaper on Office Communications Server 2007 security explaining and showing the dangers in using Public IM and VoIP clients generally and especially in businesses (Honestly anywhere if you are not well educated IT Pro ... or my grandma ;-) and this again shows that IM is a fantastic tool but not without associated security issues.

Well this was just a short warning ... the hot chocolate and buns are waiting for me.

I will be back with more content when OCS 2007 has been officially RTM'ed !

5 comments:

Esther said...

hey.. i hope MSN comes up with a solution fast. My MSN is now officially infected! =(Thanks for posting this up.. to warn others

Anonymous said...

Where do we get a copy of your security whitepaper on Office Communications Server 2007?

Unknown said...

Hi Chad,

I will post a link on msgoodies, when it is publicly available.

Anonymous said...

Hi!
Thanks for the heads up!
I've received a message from my buddy downstairs and it tries to send me .zip file.
Message body: "Hey please look at me and my pet .. :p"
"Look at this http://members.lycos.fr/ images2007/photos-webcam2007.zip "

Remove Spyware said...

I never click on those weird messages.