haha apparently you need to be "at" your computer for the link to get sent... so because I always talk to people with an away message I only got it once yesterday when I was sending a file to myself (and had to take off the message)...
so to stop it all you have to do is tell everyone to put up an away message for a few days...
I got this crap last night and I almost started a thread on it, I got to the Buddylink site and assumed it was some worthless AIMware that 12 year olds would install.
What it is more social engineering. Convincing people that it's something else, and they're too stupid to investigate the source... But then again that's why we have viruses in the first place......
I've gotten messages of this sort twice in the last day or so. Both times they came from people who had been idle for several hours (easy to tell with Adium) so obviously was some sort of virus. I closed the window without even caring what it was. I love the fact that when I click those "Wow, look what I found" links that put themselves into people's profiles I just get to a page that says "You system is not Win32 compatible" or something like that. No shit, I love my computer. Lots of my friends have put messages in their profiles about being wary of clicking links (and AIM 5.5 even has one at the bottom of the info window, I noticed) so I put a message in my profile about not having to worry about clicking links in my profile, because there was no virus that could touch me. What can I say, I love my Mac.
Yep, getting it from a friend. He's never been on for me to tell him about it. Had it happen a few months ago with a friend from school, so I went over to her house and fixed it. There was not a ton of info on it, but it was the one that sent a link saying "Check out this great mini dv camera I am getting" and pointed to a jvc link that did not work. Took her a lot of confusion from many people messaging her back about it before she figured out what was happening.
Happened to me a couple days ago, I had no clue who it was, I'm used to random message board people PMing me, and I thought the name looked familiar, I didn't open the link though, I figured it was either a windows virus/spyware or it was something gross.
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funny stuff really...
so to stop it all you have to do is tell everyone to put up an away message for a few days...
edit: ok, nm, i found it.
it's some spyware crap.
man, i'm SO GLAD i'm on a Mac.
And people with AIM can't talk to others if their away message is up, only iChat people (if I'm not mistaken). So Paul's idea won't work so well.
How about everyone in the world gets a Mac?
"The Osama Virus" is what the locals are calling it here.
I love it.
What it is more social engineering. Convincing people that it's something else, and they're too stupid to investigate the source... But then again that's why we have viruses in the first place......
Well, that and holes in Windows software...