Well, I guess we shouldn't be surprised. According to Information Week, reproduced in this Yahoo News page, someone has managed to figure out how to turn the background of Alicia Keys' MySpace page into a link to a site which puts "malware" on your computer. So, if you happen to accidentally click your mouse while it's over the background on Alicia Keys' MySpace page, you activate the malware. This may be happening on other MySpace pages - they don't know the extent of the problem yet.
Here's a link to the YouTube explanation, if you prefer video, which shows how they discovered this hack - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VipylmHnII
What should you do?
* Personally, I'd avoid MySpace for a few days, until they de-fang this thing (for a while, at least).
* If you MUST visit MySpace, be sure to keep your fingers off the clicker part of your mouse, unless you're over one of the obvious MySpace links.
Bottom Line
MySpace is a good site for social networking and personal branding, and I'm sure this particular hack will be blocked, but this is a sign that they scammers of the world follow the traffic because that's where they can gain the greatest number of victims.
So, as I've said countless times before, be careful out there! The Internet and the Web can be very unfriendly and dangerous places.
Comments