NewInstance

A reader of a well known blog, that I help to admin for a friend, today wrote me saying that his antivirus was warning him accessing the website and some other blogs about similar topics. I quickly checked it worried by cracker intrusions, but I found nothing strange. Searching the Internet, at the beginning it seemed that a new, and never seen before type of virus was spreading itself around using YouTube! Called Actns/Swif.T and being able to infect flash files seemed also to be incline to hardly damage the host operating system. Quite scary...

I was astonished to learn that flash videos on YouTube could become vehicle of computer virus infections, meaning a security hole in YouTube. Or some other obscure phishing technique that can trick so many users to embed videos from a fake YouTube site which could spread the infection... Or, even more incredibly, a virus able to reproduce over blogs linked together using flash videos as vehicle. Can you imagine what kind of plague a virus like that could it be?
Finally the mystery was undiscovered: it was a false positive enlightened by the Computer Associates Antivirus. Thankfully, a false alarm.

Linux or Mac could be a solution to forget about computer viruses. But if I were still using Windows I would at least avoid using Internet Explorer, as there are many better and more secure alternatives: Firefox, Chrome, Opera... and always, surfing the internet: caution!