by DAN CALLOWAY
Published 9 April 2010
WEAVERVILLE, NC – I’ve had a Facebook account now for almost a year. I really enjoy networking with my friends, family, and acquaintances on this very popular social networking website. However, lately, this has been interrupted with the proliferation of message viruses on Facebook.
Hackers or other nere-do-wells have apparently started infiltrating individuals’ accounts on Facebook, posing as their friends, and sending messages to the account owner and to the account owner’s friends pretending to be the account owner. Because someone who has a Facebook account will automatically open a message on Facebook if it’s from one of their friends, the likelihood of that person becoming infected from a virus payload in the message is fairly high.
There has been an increase in this activity over the last several days. Fortunately for me, I access my Facebook account using the Mozilla Firefox 3.x web browser running in Ubuntu Linux rather than one of the more popular Windows-based operating systems, and Linux is unaffected by these viruses. However, if you are running Windows XP, Vista, or 7, then watch out. You should be very careful about opening messages from your friends on Facebook for the next week or so or you run a serious risk of your system becoming infected.
I’ve tried to alert all my friends on Facebook about this virus activity and, unfortunately, some of them were already infected before they read my Wall post. In some cases, friends of mine have had to resort to blocking their friends to prevent other messages containing viruses from being sent to them. This is ludicrous.
Why can’t Facebook address this problem and stop the virus activity? Don’t their servers monitor for virus activity and prevent the spread of message viruses across their system? Unfortunately, there is no easy way to contact the Facebook staff to let them know this is a problem. If you don’t believe me, try looking for a contact link on Facebook. You won’t be able to find one, and especially, you won’t be able to call or email a human being to let them know they have a problem. This is obviously by design.
So, be on the alert on Facebook for the next several weeks. Hopefully, Facebook will get the message–didn’t mean to make a pun–and put a stop to this activity so we can get back to normal. I want to be able to collaborate with friends and family and share videos and photographs once again without having to worry about infecting someone. Anybody seen a Facebook condom?
I don’t mean to be too “in your face” with this, and I know it’s completely unrelated but I will just say it anyway! Whhhhhaat the heck has Obama been smoking these days? There, I got it off my chest!
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