A day before Hari Raya Aidifitri 1431, I receive a message from a fellow amateur radio operator in my Yahoo Messenger client (I use Pidgin). The message was seemingly genuine from him asking if I’m receiving his message, after answering his questions, he proceeds to ask me to wait for a moment ask he wants me to try something. It turns out that he asks me to visit an online quiz website.

The exchange seems almost fluid and being done by a human being, except that my friend and I never had conversation in English! This seems all too fishy when he didn’t response to my conclusion that his computer is infected by a malware/virus. Here are the screenshot of the exchange, (warning: the transcripts contain expletives)

Beware, these kind of viruses can compromise the security of your computer and may be used to harvest your password and other personal information for criminal intent. A seemingly innocent Online Quiz website may be used by phishers in order to commit fraudulent activity.

Verify whether it is really your friend is communicating with you and not somebody else or a program pretending to be him/her, and most importantly do not fell victim to Yahoo Messenger viruses, the result can be devastating.

Tags: alert, computer, Internet, malware, phishers, phishing, pidgin, security, virus, warning, worm, yahoo messenger