A Big New Problem

I've seen many of my friends posting bulletins that they didn't personally post. They clicked a link to some site once, and it automatically keeps sending out bulletins. The other night, I sent out a bulletin over MySpace, encouraging anyone having this problem to E-mail me. While I got no E-mails, I talked to some of my friends. It looks like they are somehow being redirected to URLs (sites) that look like MySpace. But when you login to them, it posts those pesky bulletins. These bulletins often say "FREE RINGTONES!" or other things, generally with "FREE" in the title.

How can you block yourself from this? My suggestion is to change your password, and to watch EACH address in your URL bar carefully. If it does not say "login.myspace.com, myspace.com," or have myspace.com towards the beginning, DO NOT log into it. If you login to your profile and it asks for your account information again, and the bar does not contain myspace.com, then just go back to www.myspace.com and go to your home page. You'll see your homepage and the bulletins won't post.

The next question, though, is how is it doing this? I have a couple of theories, but the most likely one seems to be that the original link you clicked on installed some malware on your computer. This malware would detect when you enter www.myspace.com and would redirect you to a look-alike site without you knowing. I advise to run a virus scan on your computer. If you don't have antivirus software, visit http://www.avast.com/eng/download-avast-home.html and download avast! Antivirus. It works wonders. If you can't find any viruses or anything, then it's possible that there is some other way this is being accomplished. The people have to have a way to redirect you to their URL, from the MySpace homepage, so I will continue to investigate the possibilities, but in the meantime, don't login to anything that doesn't have myspace.com in the URL bar. I will update this blog when I get more info.