On my Messenger every few minutes I get a message that says it’s sent by my wife, and sometimes one from my mother which says
hahaha is this on the picture? :))
h ttp://apps.facebook.com/faceimages/photo.php?=
And then following the = is the E-mail address of the person who supposedly sent it. Also, for some reason the first h is not part of the link.
When I first clicked on it because I thought it was from my wife it took me to MySpace, I think it was, even though the link says Facebook.
I tried Googling this and have nothing so far. And I don’t know if this is related, but a couple of times when I rebooted and Messenger came up it said that I was logged in to two locations, but when I Googled that it said you can get that message if you have your Hotmail page open and log on to messenger.
I guess I’ll change my passwords, but have any of you had this problem?
I have Windows 7, and with the version of Messenger on it I had the option to log out of my computer, or a remote location (where I’m guessing maybe a hacker got into my account) but on my wife’s XP computer it didn’t seem to have that option. So either no-one is remotely linked into her account, or previous versions of Messenger don’t allow you to log off from remote locations.
Anyway, I logged off the remote connection then changed my password. My wife says that a friend had the same problem, sent the spam link to her (to my wife) and then other friends of my wife have been getting spam E-mails claiming to be from her.
When I tried Googling the problem I wasn’t able to come up with anything.
I know there have been viruses/trojans that propagated themselves via MSN/Windows Live messenger - the infected machine inserting links like the one you saw into an ongoing conversation, and when the recipient of the messages clicks on one, it infects their MSN client, and so on.
If you’re still seeing the messages when you’re in conversation with someone, it may only be their machine that’s compromised.
In your circumstances, I would:
[ul]
[li]Shut down Live Messenger (you might need to use Task Manager to do this, as clicking the X just minimises it)[/li][li]Log into Windows Live in a web browser, change your password[/li][li]Go to Windows Update and install all of the latest patches, one of which will probably be the Malicious Software tool (which runs automatically during the update process)[/li][li]Update your Antivirus software and get it to run a full scan of the system[/li][/ul]
I logged out, changed my password, and a few hours later my wife go a spam IM from me.
So I logged out again and am running a few virus and spyware checkers. Microsoft Security essentials, which I ran first, only caught one problem. But Spybot and Ad-Aware have caught a whole bunch more. I have one more program to run. After that I’ll check for updates. Thanks.