Catching the Bug: Nostalgic for the Viruses I Haven’t Seen

I was going through some posts today and got a bit nostalgic. At In Touch Promotions we try to post promptly whenever we hear of a virus, phishing scheme or nasty worm crawling around the ’net. I haven’t seen many of these little bugs in action, which I guess is a good thing, even though it would be nice to see that more people ran across and avoided them, rather than no reports at all. I don’t want to see any virus in action among my friends and fans, so the most recent bugs are posted here to remind you to not go there.

Remember the “NW Airlines Free Tickets” scam that In Touch Promotions reported on February 22nd? Awww, that was a good one. And, I got to see it in action when a friend of a friend posted it as a comment to my friend’s post on an unrelated matter. The friend of a friend was able to take the necessary steps to clear the virus by connecting to our friends at Mashable: http://on.mash.to/ew1jzP.

The GMail phishing scheme came to light last Thursday (March 3rd): don’t click on any email links in your GMail inbox that ask you to “authenticate your account.” They’re phishing for your personal info and password.

Droid phones ran into some trouble last week. If you have an older Droid phone, it might have a trojan if you downloaded one of these apps, according Google Android blog “Androinica,” referred to us by GBGeeks.com: http://bit.ly/hWdVmU.

Then there was the tweet viewer worm crawling around Twitter. You know how you shouldn’t click on anything that says it can tell you who’s been looking at your profile? There’s no way any software can tell you that kind of info, according to our friends at FacebookForum. Anyway, I had seen that some friends fell prey to that post/scam link on Facebook. On Saturday I saw that it’s now hitting Twitter for a little while.

Oh, yes, and the marriage scam! The post asks “who will you marry” and has a man-and-wife thumbnail.

While a few colleagues and friends have run across these viruses, phishes and scams, I’m surprised I haven’t seen it more. It’s nice to think that In Touch Promotions helped our followers become aware of these scams and pass the info on to your friends and colleagues. Thanks for being there with us!

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