It's always worth reminding people that they should be careful though. We live in times when you really do need to take precautions before you hook a Windows PC up to the outside world. In this particular case though, it's probably just coincidence that people clicked on that particular meme and then got themselves infected elsewhere or noticed that they'd had an infection for a while. There are a lot of machines out there that aren't as clean as they should be.
I did a bunch of screen captures of a Harry Potter special the BBC did about 18 months ago, which the Leaky Cauldron asked if they could use. I said yes, but asked them not to put my email address on the credit. Wires got crossed, and they did. In the half day or so before I could get them to remove the email address from the page, I got a bucketload of viruses emailed to an address that hadn't previously been compromised. As soon as it was removed, the flood of viruses dried up entirely. That had to be entirely down to just people with infected machines going to that web page to look at those pictures, oblivious to the fact that their machines had lurking nastys.
On a couple of occasions when I've received mail viruses I've been able to identify the source and let the friend in question know that they need to check their machine out. But most of the time - as in the example above - it's complete strangers, and then there's just nothing you can do.
no subject
I did a bunch of screen captures of a Harry Potter special the BBC did about 18 months ago, which the Leaky Cauldron asked if they could use. I said yes, but asked them not to put my email address on the credit. Wires got crossed, and they did. In the half day or so before I could get them to remove the email address from the page, I got a bucketload of viruses emailed to an address that hadn't previously been compromised. As soon as it was removed, the flood of viruses dried up entirely. That had to be entirely down to just people with infected machines going to that web page to look at those pictures, oblivious to the fact that their machines had lurking nastys.
On a couple of occasions when I've received mail viruses I've been able to identify the source and let the friend in question know that they need to check their machine out. But most of the time - as in the example above - it's complete strangers, and then there's just nothing you can do.