Can you get a Virus over IM??

Nirvana1979

Junior Member
Nov 24, 2002
23
0
0
Can you get a virus or trojan through instant messaging programs WITHOUT clicking or downloading anything? A few days ago, I was on yahoo chat, and a guy said he was going to fry my hard-drive(with one of those "loader" programs people use in chat rooms or IM's. I didn't believe that he could! I'm running windows xp with all the latest security patches, and I have a firewall. I didn't think someone could hack your computer without either knowing your password or having you actually execute a file.

Well, my computer worked fine the rest of the day, but when I tried to log-on the next day, I got an error message stating that some system files were missing or corrupted. I booted into safe mode, and did a system restore but it didn't work. So I wound up having to do a complete re-install of windows.

Is it possible to corrupt someone's system files through an IM program? If anyone knows anything about this, I'd be very interested to find out how it works.
 

cmetz

Platinum Member
Nov 13, 2001
2,296
0
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Any network application potentially could have a buffer overflow, allowing code injection into a system, and all kinds of things could happen from there, trojan and virus included.