Thursday, December 04, 2008

Hackers Ahead - Beware of Flash Update

A friend sent me a link to a video, and I love watching funny YouTube videos so I was eager to click even without reading any of the message that was included with the link. I was directed to a site with a typical video player as you would find on YouTube but it loaded for a few seconds and then popped up a notice that my flash player was outdated and I needed to upgrade, and provided a handy link to the update installation file.

Well most people would just run the new flash player right? While the notice may look ligitimate, I just know from experience that if my computer needs any updating, I will do so from a trusted source so I closed the notice, and instead went to official Adobe website to download the latest Flash Player from them. My player was not the latest version so I performed the update and returned to try and watch the video. Still no video, the site was a trick to get unsuspecting viewers to run a spyware program and collect personal information.

After some research this has been going on since August
, and it was the first I have heard of it. Chances are you may have fallen for this, if you think you may have, you might want to be sure your virus and spyware software are up to date and scan your system.

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