Is my computer still safe?
Oh gurus of the current state of Mac OS and PC viruses, malware, and so on.... some advice please. Some of you may have gotten an obviously virus/spam message in your Facebook inbox from me today, with the subject "tua foto?!" and the phrase "Es este tu foto?" along with a link that may have been some variation on very sketchy or kind of legit-looking, and the closer "con amor!!". I'm curious, are there any known Mac OS X viruses that have successfully installed on Macs and stolen things like banking and email passwords as the user goes about their business? Last I checked there were still no known Mac OS X viruses, so hopefully I am safe, at least as far as my computer and things outside of Facebook go?
Here is the story -- On Feb. 10 I got a Facebook message from a friend in Mexico with the "Es este tu foto?" query and a link. Just my luck that it's a distant friend in a Spanish speaking country... heck I don't know what she uses for Flickr etc. over there, and the link actually had the facebook domain, the full "www.facebook.com/", at the start of it, and some more stuff with the word "photo" in it, so it seemed like some kind of photobucket thing although it was not one I had seen before. Yes yes yes lets ignore the strange mixture of Italian and grammatically incorrect Spanish... this is the internet, and people misspell things all the time. Against my better judgment, I clicked on it, it loaded a bland website of some sort, and wanted me to enter more info into blanks or register or something, at which point I said "yeah whatever" and closed my browser. That's it. No downloaded files as far as I know, nothing entered into any boxes, I didn't do anything except click the link in the facebook message. But here we are 10 days later, and at least three people reported to me today that they got this same message from me on Facebook, with different links. If you're one of these people and haven't done so already, please visit this facebook security page and report my profile URL as well as the URL of the link in the false message you received from me (don't click that link in the process of copying and pasting it!!). If you happen to have clicked on such a link, your own Facebook account is likely infected as well, which you should also report, somehow...
So anyway, I changed my FB password and reported this stuff, but I have no idea whether my account is still sending out virus messages, or how long FB will take to fix it, or anything. Is this likely to go away on its own? Am I safe to continue doing online banking and so on from my machine? Is it at all likely that I now have a keystroke logger infecting my Mac or something similarly very bad?
Here is the story -- On Feb. 10 I got a Facebook message from a friend in Mexico with the "Es este tu foto?" query and a link. Just my luck that it's a distant friend in a Spanish speaking country... heck I don't know what she uses for Flickr etc. over there, and the link actually had the facebook domain, the full "www.facebook.com/", at the start of it, and some more stuff with the word "photo" in it, so it seemed like some kind of photobucket thing although it was not one I had seen before. Yes yes yes lets ignore the strange mixture of Italian and grammatically incorrect Spanish... this is the internet, and people misspell things all the time. Against my better judgment, I clicked on it, it loaded a bland website of some sort, and wanted me to enter more info into blanks or register or something, at which point I said "yeah whatever" and closed my browser. That's it. No downloaded files as far as I know, nothing entered into any boxes, I didn't do anything except click the link in the facebook message. But here we are 10 days later, and at least three people reported to me today that they got this same message from me on Facebook, with different links. If you're one of these people and haven't done so already, please visit this facebook security page and report my profile URL as well as the URL of the link in the false message you received from me (don't click that link in the process of copying and pasting it!!). If you happen to have clicked on such a link, your own Facebook account is likely infected as well, which you should also report, somehow...
So anyway, I changed my FB password and reported this stuff, but I have no idea whether my account is still sending out virus messages, or how long FB will take to fix it, or anything. Is this likely to go away on its own? Am I safe to continue doing online banking and so on from my machine? Is it at all likely that I now have a keystroke logger infecting my Mac or something similarly very bad?