Virus hits Instant Messengers

March 9th, 2005 at 06:41pm

Instant messengers or IMs haven been offline in our office due to the recent virus attack. So, no more windows messenger nor yahoo messenger for a couple of days.

I was doing some work, and all of a sudden, a message popped up from a friend in pune!, it had link to a .pif file on the net, and a message..saying “lol! see it! u’ll like it!”. First thing I noticed was, it was a file with .pif extension ..which alerted me! and second, this person was marked as away. So, I preferred not to click that link. I wrote to him, asking him what was going on ?.. and the response that I got was… ” something is wrong here,.. I clicked a link, and now, its sending the link to everyone”… Wow! :)….a typical virus attack!

Lessens to be learnt : Never Click on a file with .pif extension, unless and until you know what it contains. There are couple of such extensions, which are considered to be executables, apart from .exe’s

What next, within minutes, I got similar messages with links from around 5 to 6 users on my contact list. .. I immediately called the service department, and alerted them about the same., But by then, the damage was done…. and quite a lot of machines were infected. Although, the virus did not have a heavy payload, but, its an eye opener.

As a precautionary measure, all the IMs have been disabled for a couple of days now, till the infection is taken care of. The latest virus signature now takes care of this, and clears off the infection. So, in the next couple of days, IMs should be back.

Now that the IMs are not there, I realize how important they are ! :)……….. mailing someone for some small stuff is really a killer.

Entry Filed under: Net