AIM Virus

Question

Level 1

20 points

AIM Virus

I apologize ahead of time, as I don't know where to put this.... Are Macs vulnerable to the links that are sent leading to virii over AOL Instant Messenger? The reason I ask this is that today a link was sent to me and I accidentally clicked on it, however all that happened was a file on my desktop with the ".com" extension.

Posted on Oct 12, 2005 9:20 PM

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Answer 1

Rafe H.

Level 5

7,091 points

Oct 12, 2005 9:24 PM in response to typobox

a file on my desktop with the ".com" extension.

That's a Window's executable file you "accidentally" downloaded. If you were on Windows, it would have been executed and bad things would've probably happened.

Macs can't execute Windows file without special software.

One day, you may "accidentally" click a link in AIM and a Mac executable file will download. Be careful.

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Answer 2

msuper69

Level 6

8,689 points

Oct 13, 2005 7:28 AM in response to Rafe H.

'One day, you may "accidentally" click a link in AIM and a Mac executable file will download. Be careful.'

But if that ever happens, you will get 2 warnings:

The download manager will tell you that the file contains a program and if you decide to run it, you will get a warning that this is the first time this program is being run.

You have to reply to both warnings that it is ok to proceed. The opposite is true in Windows; that's why all that malware can get installed and run in the background w/o the user being aware.

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Answer 3

Oct 13, 2005 7:59 AM in response to typobox

The short answer is that any nasties you happen to download that exist today will be nothing but dead data on your machine. Like finding a dead snake in your kitchen, just throw it out with the trash.

Matthew Whiting

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Answer 4

typobox Author

Level 1

20 points

Oct 13, 2005 9:11 PM in response to typobox

Ah, I see. Well thank you for your respones, I will be more careful. 🙂

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Answer 5

Oct 14, 2005 9:41 PM in response to typobox

sorry to drift off topic but i'm new mac owner and i have been trying to download aim. It downloads as aim.bin and i'm unable to open it. maybe i'm not using the right application to open it, then again i'm new and i don't know what to do. please help! overlooked16@hotmail.com

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Answer 6

Oct 14, 2005 9:56 PM in response to Andrew Garcia

You need Stuffit expander. Head over to the downloads page.

You could just use iChat anyway, as it signs into the AIM network.

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