I got a message today from someone from MSN messenger today that said
look here
www.freebonusd.com
When I signed back online later, he was online, and denied sending the message because his computer had been being repaired all day. When I click on it, it sends me to a free ringtone site, and sends him to a porn site. I’m running Mercury Messenger on a Macbook Pro running Leopard, and he’s running Vista and Windows Live Messenger.
Google shows nothing, but I defer to your knowledge!
A whois on the domain shows it was registered from turkey via godaddy.com
The domain servers are “casbonustoday.com” which directs me to a ringtone site (as does the url you provided, make sure your friend is entering it correctly).
I figure it’s another annoying little ad type thing. Probably with a minor virulent program that infects MSN messenger. Googling the domain name did bring up teh possibility of it corrupting your desktop though. Overall I’d say run a spyware scan and virus scan and if nothing turns up put it out of your mind these things pop up from time to time no real biggie.
Edit: a tracert brings me to this site:
http://akif.org/
Which I cannot make heads or tails of, other than it appears to be in turkish.
I’ve seen viruses that infect MSN messenger before - a friend of mine was chatting with me once and said (or appeared to) “Hey, wanna see the photo I took today?” - I replied “sure…” - and it was only the fact that she very quickly replied “Sure what?” that I didn’t click on the link.
The link would have transferred the virus to my machine, where it would have infected my Messenger.
OP: You’re on a Mac, using a third party messenger - I’d say you’re pretty safe. Your friend ought to do a virus and malware scan.
That’s what I already suggested. I copied Jragon’s post to him, and he did believe me then that MSN messenger viruses existed. Which was all I really cared about to begin with, because I figured that I was OK.