One of the most ridiculous items in the news is this picture text message that just came into my inbox, which lead to a bit of research.

So, recently there has been a huge spike in people searching for “white people stole my car” in Google. [Link to GoogleTrends] The searching is the result of this picture message (shown below), taken using a cellular phone.

Depiction of "White People Stole My Car" prank

Depiction of "White People Stole My Car" prank

While the picture is intended to be humorous, it has been used to distribute viruses and spyware.

A google search for “white people stole my car” will bring up a list of sites explaining the trend. Many sites will explain to you that what really happened is that someone misspelled the term “black people stole my car” (specifically the word “black”), which lead to Google suggesting “Did you mean: black people stole my car?” . The jokester then deleted the misspelling of the word “black” in the search box, and typed in the word “white” instead without pressing the “Search” button in Google again.

Of course, many people will then try to duplicate what they saw in the picture.

However, trying to misspell the term “black people stole my car” will bring up web pages spammed with keywords for every possible misspelling of “black people stole my car”.

AND THESE PAGES WILL INFECT YOUR COMPUTER!!!!!!!

And an infected computer is not humorous. (At least, not when you’re the one being infected.)

So whether the image being distributed via text messages and emails is related to the websites popping up in google for the search terms “black people stole my car”, our suggestion to you is to avoid visiting any of these sites unless you’re either:

  1. Really brave.
  2. On an OS other than Windoze
  3. Have a really good firewall/anti-virus program
  4. Have an available backup of your computer system handy before visiting
  5. Using a Virtual Machine to see what would happen to your real machine if you visited one of the sites.

Which is not a bad idea! I think I will see what happens when viewing one of the infected sites using a VM running Windows XP.

Keep on being geeks, and having a good sense of humor, but remember: nobody likes a racist!

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