Skype warning.

SailorSam

I've just received an email from the OU with the following warning to Skype users.
B U L L E T I N
Skype users are warned to be on their guard; malicious instant messages
have been sent through the service, with a clickable link designed to
infect Windows computers. Clicking on a suspicious link would lead to the
downloading of a ZIP file containing malicious executable files. These
should normally be trapped by your anti-virus or Malware programme if it is
up to date and paid for. If it succeeds however, the Trojan horse program
will open a back door into your machine, allowing a remote hacker to take
control of an infected PC.

Always remember to be suspicious of unsolicited out-of-character messages
sent to you by your friends on any online system.

mr_fishbulb

Malicious links are always being spread by instant messaging programmes, but thanks for the post for awareness.

SailorSam wrote: »

These should normally be trapped by your anti-virus or Malware programme if it is up to date and paid for.

But this but is complete BS!

sillygoose

These 'warning' emails are just designed to pray on people's desire to help others because quite understandably we want to pass them on to protect others, nice people like you want to help.

Sadly the actual 'threat' is rarely real, its the passing on of the convincing looking message that the spammers really want, on its travels it picks up a chain of peoples email addresses due to the percentage of people that don't forward by 'BCC' to keep other recipients secret.

Like a billion fishing lines cast out, a few will eventually make it home again to a spammer carrying a valuable chain of peoples active and private email addresses.

Best thing to do with any email like this is supress your admirable public spirit and delete it. In the long run you will do your contacts a bigger favour than passing on a warning about an unlikely threat. (If someone did get sent a virus infected zip file to get infected they would have to extract an executable file and run it - and anyone who doesn't know better than doing this should probably avoid using the internet for now and seek advice and training!)

waddler_8

sillygoose wrote: »

Sadly the actual 'threat' is rarely real...

This one is real, unfortunately: http://www.gfi.com/blog/skype-users-targeted-with-ransomware-and-click-fraud/

mr_fishbulb

waddler_8 wrote: »

This one is real, unfortunately: http://www.gfi.com/blog/skype-users-targeted-with-ransomware-and-click-fraud/

Yup - here's another article about it:
http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/10/08/skype-worm-spreads

sillygoose

waddler_8 wrote: »

This one is real, unfortunately: http://www.gfi.com/blog/skype-users-targeted-with-ransomware-and-click-fraud/

True but its no different to any of the usual dangerwise, they should be teaching the basics of not being infected by these at infant schools!

"to infect the computer, you’ll need to manually click the download link, open the zip and run the executable. On top of that, anybody trying to open the file who hasn’t switched off file security warnings will be told that “The publisher could not be verified, are you sure you want to run this software” so there’s plenty of chances to dodge this bullet."

Plus a decent AV program shouldn't allow it to run on top of all that. If someone is that determined to get infected I don't think any warnings will be any use!