Washington State

Office of the Attorney General

Attorney General

Bob Ferguson

Users of Skype, the VOIP service, are being hit with a virus spread by fake instant messages. The security team at Skype as of Sept. 11 was working with domain owners to shut down malicious sites. The worm infects PCs that use Windows and sends chat messages to other Skype users asking them to click on a link that appears as a harmless .jpeg file. Skype says that expert users — and only expert users — can remove the worm manually and provides instructions on its blog. According to an e-week.com article, the worm sends a selection of come-ons, including:

haha lol
how are u ? :)
I used photoshop and edited it
really funny
u happy ?
what ur friend name wich is in photo ?
your photos looks realy nice

Viruses can spread through other IM services including Windows Live (formerly MSN), Yahoo and AOL. Never open, accept or download a file in IM from someone you don't know. Even then, don't open it unless you know what the file is and you were expecting it. Contact the sender by e-mail, phone or some other method to confirm that what they sent was not a virus.

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