.pif's are bad

Phi

There are viruses travelling around via MSN messenger either in link or file form. A number of my friends have been caught by them. The links/files all have various names, but they all end in .pif. When you open them, they propogate to other's on your contact list and can infect your computer with a virus.

Summary: don't touch .pif's

Thankyou

-Φ

The Cabl3 Guy

duh silly!






What the hell is the origin of the .pif I used to see them alot in Windows 3.11 back in the day. Haven't seen em since.

JackN

.pif 's are Program Information (or Initialize) Files

They were used mostly to create an Icon for non windows DOS apps to set up environ variables and DOS window specifics.

Random Chaos

I love how backwards compatibility by MS always allows viruses, worms, and trojans to run...but never your old apps.

E.T

Are you sure they're PIFs because they might not be PIFs, if you use nuisance feature which disables showing file extensions of known file types file which have txt as extension might be well even EXE.

Phi

All the versions I've seen have been .pif's. Trick is, the real MSN messenger doesn't tell you the extension of the sending file (ooh...clever...), so the only reason I knew they were .pif's were because trillian told me that's what was trying to send. I've also had a message with a link to a file ending in .pif.

I doubt they're .exe's, but they might be .png's, in relation to [url=http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/MS05-009.mspx]this security bulliten[/url] (friends who clicked the link mentioned seeing a photo).

-Φ