Posted by Rio S.

I’m writing this on Windows safe mode, and if you’ve ever been hit by a computer virus, you’d know what I’m doing right now – scanning my PC.

I had fired up my PC again after a couple of hours of trying to sleep (insomnia attack) and logged on to my usual haunts. Gmail, Yahoo Messenger!, Cabal, and Multiply, among others. A few minutes later, a contact from YM sent me gibberish and a link. After sending me the message, the contact immediately went offline. (Hit and run messages that contain links should ring the bells in your head.)

Now folks, here’s something you need to know about YM. Its security system consists of nothing but a potato and some pieces of tape (read: absolutely useless or totally nonexistent). So if you don’t want to get icky viruses, trojans, or worms running around in your computer (or if you don’t want to get rick rolled), here’s a piece of advice: Do not be click trigger happy. It’s good to be curious, but at least be careful. Before opening anything, do a quick search in Google.

Here’s the message I got:

Tha nguoi dung noi se yeu minh toi mai thoi thi gio day toi se vui hon. Gio nguoi lac loi buoc chan ve noi xa xoi, cay dang chi rieng minh toi… [link]

At first glance, I thought the message was in Thai, but a couple of searches in Google later, I found that it was in Vietnamese. Oooh, useless information. Another curious thing that I found in the Google search results (more than 300k search results for an entire sentence verbatim is another indicator that something is wrong) is that the said message is the harbinger of W32.Svich, a worm. more…