Has anyone received any Windows Messaging Service spam?

This is a particluarly scary and insipid version of mass marketing that takes advantage of Windows’s built-in messaging capabilities (not to be confused with Windows Instant Messenger, M$’s attempt to steal AOL’s market) to pop a message on your computer terminal.

Messaging Service is used by the system or by system administrators to send messages to users. The result is a Windows dialog box, complete with the correct buttons and widgets, that pops up on your screen. You may have received one legitimately in your computing history. I received on at work a few weeks ago warning me that the share I had just accesses was infected with a virus: “please run your virus scan software,” the sysadmin implored.

So it was not a shocker, initially, when I saw such a message pop up on my home PC a month or two ago. I didn’t even read it initially, but let it stay behind my Word window while I finished a particularly juicy paragraph about Veritas Volume Manager.

But when I looked at it, I was shocked. It read: Check this out! (copy and paste into your browser) . It had an IP-based URL attached. I didn’t want to click the OK on it for fear I was about to install some horrid software onto my computer. However, when I saw it was a Windows Messaging alert, I clicked “OK.”

I knew immediately what was happening, and, while I had always been a bit lax on personal firewalls, I went to CNET.com and found ZoneAlarm. I highly recommend that everybody get some sort of personal firewall. It’s only a matter of time before these types of “spam” turn into methods via which malicious users (I love that term from security speak) will compromise your PC’s security.

Here’s an article on Wired about Windows Messaging Spams.