Viruses, Virus’ or Virii?

You know, I never could work out what the plural of ‘virus’ was …

Any ideas, anybody?

Anybody?

No?

Oh, well … I’ll ask Dan, Trevor or Nan, when I see them next; actually, Nan, former landlady of the Sir Charles Napier, only lives up the road from me …

But I’m going slightly sideways, there, aren’t I?

I am, aren’t I?

The reason I’m banging on about viruses is because of the news, today; it seems that the phishing attack originally thought to have just been aimed at Hotmail, Microsoft’s webmail servie, has also targeted Gmail, Earthlink and Yahoo accounts.

Which is worrying …

Because while — rampant MacBoi that I am — I’ve long since abandoned my Hotmail account, I have still got a Googlemail account, happily accessible to anyone reading this.

Ok, granted for one of us with any of these freebie accounts, all we have to do is make sure we DON’T hand out bank details to anyone that asks for them, and make sure we reset our passwords.

But it’s still a little worrying to see it happen. And rather clever of whoever has done it, to go after these things.

After all, I’m not the only person to have a Googlemail account. And I’m betting you know somebody with a Hotmail or Yahoo account, don’t you?

Makes you think, doesn’t it?

On top of that, a couple of days ago, I spent a frustrating twenty minutes, trying to log into my Facebook account.

Seems I now know why.

Quite some time ago, I had a post in my news-feed, from someone I didn’t know, telling me they’d seen a funny picture of me, and wanted to know what I was doing.

I ignored it.

Well, hit the ‘Hide’ option, anyway.

Now, usually, as with many of us Mac owners, I’m not too worried about infection by 99% of viruses out there. After all, most of them are aimed at Windoze based PC’s, with a large majority of the remainder aimed at Linux machines; the few cross-platform — like the Firefox clipboard one, last year — ones that hit OS X tending to be big news; same with the proof of concept Inqtana one, that hit the headlines the year before.

But a worm that seemingly goes through social media you’ve signed up for?

That’s nasty!!

And does explain why I couldn’t get on dear FB, the other week …