I wrote a post in January 2012 about a Twitter virus that was sending direct messages to a person’s followers. What surprised me was how many people were clicking on the link. The blog post was so popular that it inspired a Oprah.com blog post. So why are we falling for this virus? As the Oprah blog entitled it…”What Are People Saying About You? And Why Do You Care?”
Here’s the latest one that I received:
Now I do have a few trolls who say bad things about me. I keep track of everything they do. But I recognized this Twitter virus because of its general nature. It’s about you… not about Jeff. But just to be safe, I sent the sender a direct message to see if they really sent it. By no means did I click on the link. By no means should you click on the link either.
Here’s a quote from the Oprah blog written by Amy Shearn: “Why? Why do we care if people are saying “terrible things”? Were we all flashing back to high school, picturing a gaggle of mean girls snickering about us in some dim corner of the Internet? I mean, we are grown-a** women, right?” Obviously this virus hits us right at the heart. We do believe that someone really is saying bad things about us. But let me reassure you on this one thing, for most of us, no one is spending their time talking or saying nasty things about us.
We, as a society, need to start seeing ourselves in a better light. We need to see the best in people and believe that for ourselves. The Twitter virus preys on those who have low self-esteem. It’s time to raise the bar folks.
Here’s the rest of my original post. I hope it helps you recognize the virus and stay safe – and what you should do if you clicked on the link:
It’s going around again. The Direct Message on Twitter says “You seen what this person is saying about you? (Link removed) terrible things..“
I have seen this a few times today on Twitter. I really don’t think I am that popular yet, nor have I urinated in a lot of people’s cereal this morning either, that I should be seeing the above message over and over again today.
What is happening is that people have clicked the link to see what bad things others have said and …bam…”They are infected with a virus that uses their Twitter account to send out these messages”.
Some words to the wise, “don’t click on the link“. Just delete the Direct Message (DM). And by the way, go and change your Twitter password while you are at it. It would not hurt to do a full virus scan either.
These viruses use generic messages in hope that many people will click on them. I have alerted those who have sent this to me to perform the above steps.
Lessons to take away from this experience:
- Don’t click on everything that has a hyperlink
- When in doubt about whether sender really did send this, contact the sender to verify that they did purposely send it
- If you get infected, login into the affected site and change your password as soon as possible
- Make sure there is no gift left behind on your device by doing a virus scan
You have to protect all your accounts by acting wisely at all times. Don’t be click happy and click on everything that gets in front of you.
Please share this post if you think it will help your friends. If you want to see the comments from the original post, here’s the link
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