Can Social Media Spread Viruses During Big Weather?
This article poses the question whether or not large natural disasters, including weather events, enable hackers to spread malware and viruses far and wide. On this blog we have talked before about checking your sources and not being fooled by social media weather photo hoaxes. And we've talked about the ticking time bomb of storm chasing and wondered whether or not social media is egging that on.
But this is something I hadn't thought about much. It's more about Twitter and less of an issue on Facebook where people are your "friends" (although the article points out that, just because they are your friends, doesn't mean they are unwittingly passing along a bad link). Twitter is more likely to obscure web addresses with "shorteners" too. How sure are you that the hot link to the latest "incredible weather story" or photo doesn't contain malware?
In theory, you shouldn't open a stranger's link on the web any quicker than you would open one via email. But that doesn't make for a very good web experience, so the best thing you can do is have anti-malware and anti-virus software running which has a "real-time" component - in other words it's constantly watching the pages you surf for potential problems. And if you get caught in one of those "infinite loops" where a malicious website starts opening up multiple windows, kill the program immediately (on Windows XP, do CTRL-ALT-DELETE / Task Manager / Internet Browser / End Task).
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