Shoutbox

i messaged a friend while off line

i got back a message with a link which stupidly i opened

an attempt was to take me to a page and get my user name and password

have had several more now and suddenly have found that it has used my messenger profile to contact on of my contacts

any ideas how to clear this
where is live messenger hooked onto - does it accept cookies etc as browser does?  it is a browser link

where is the virus situated on my pc or on live messenger server?

Scan your pc with your anti-virus and also try that MSN cleaner. Next time, dont click on such links that are suspected received from any contacts. (e.g OMG u gotta see this! Go here/ You gotta check those pictures etc then a url.). The same goes for zipped files, dont accept them.

Change your password. IIRC it's the only way to do it...

i did the same thing, my brother had to do a anti virus scan, and then un-install messenger plus & live, then re-install them and the problem was gone.

gud luck x

quote:

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Originally posted by Moh Zayadi
Scan your pc with your anti-virus and also try that MSN cleaner. Next time, dont click on such links that are suspected received from any contacts. (e.g OMG u gotta see this! Go here/ You gotta check those pictures etc then a url.). The same goes for zipped files, dont accept them.

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Works quite well for me too!

Ps: most of those kind of "virusses" are not situated on your own PC! And therefor will not be detected or can not be cleaned by virus scanners.

The messages are send from websites and servers. The very same websites and servers where you typed in your login and password when they asked you to.

Those websites and servers simply use your login and password to sign in into their own 'Messenger client'. As such they have access to your entire contact list. From there they simply start their own conversation with one of your contacts (thus in your name) and send the links. They also often gather email addresses (thus, all your contacts) to sell them to spam companies.

The only solution is to change your login password so that those sites/servers can't login into your account anymore.

Also, report the site to the abuse center of MS so they can take some actions against those sites.

And to prevent this kind of stuff from happening is to NEVER EVER entering your login and password on 3rd party sites which promise you to do stuff (eg: see who has blocked you is the most famous hoax).

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Other types of such spam virusses come from infections by clicking on links. Although this because more rare.

But note that "clicking on a link" will not get you infected. The infection happens when you execute the thing you've downloaded when you clicked on the link.

These types of infections are situated on your own PC and could be cleaned by some decent virus scanners. However, since many of those virusses are very simple and use nothing more than very common and 'safe' routines they are quite often NOT detected at all, even if you do have a virus scanner! So be carefull.

In any case:

quote:

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Originally posted by JennyLovesAdam
and then un-install messenger plus & live, then re-install them and the problem was gone.

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simply uninstalling and reinstalling will never solve those kind of "virusses" though. (Messenger Plus! has got nothing todo with all this and doesn't need to be uninstalled at all anyways). Uninstalling will not remove the "virus", it will simply uninstall Messenger while the virus will still be present.

Certain types of these virusses put a DLL in the installation directory of Messenger. But uninstalling Messenger will not remove those DLLs, you also need to manually remove the installation directory after uninstalling and thus removing those DLLs. Other types of virusses simply put their program files elsewhere on your hard disk.