online threats; virus

was wondering why one would create virus to attack someones computer, and end up having trouble to clean up their computer, sometimes to the extend of reformating the computer. now let me educate you with my little knowledge on these that you might want/need to know.

currently, online threats are more prevalent at social networks. the user's friend might click on links, thinking that they are harmless, downloading worms to hijack their computer which launch other kinds of infection. there are too many kind of virus to list, but i happen to pick this to talk about which spams and steals keystrokes. though there are a various type of them, the goal are the same, to dupe people into divulging personal information or install worm to hijack your computer. so not all computers are safe to do credit card transactions, to check your mails, or anything that requires stuff like password and personal informations.( all the while i thought keylogger was a program, didnt know it is considered as virus )

for that, i went to google social network scams. and found out some pretty convincing scams that you wont want to fall into.

SHORTEN TRICKY URLS
it replaces lengthy web addresses with shorter ones for you yo post on twitter or facebook. as users cannot view the real deal, they cannot spot the scam. like switching wikipedia.org to wikpedia.org. once cyber criminals are being lured to their webpages, which can be infested with malware or con users into downloading data-stealing software.
*really tricky
FAKE CELEBRITIES
scammers running these pages will certainly post malicious sites for you to click on. to verify if the page is authentic, find out the number of fans/followers the celebrity has. be wary if a big starhas only a few hundreds or few thousand fans. also check celebrity's official site for reals links to twitter or flickr.
*this make me put lesser trust on social network.
FACEBOOK PHISHING
messages are sent to facebook users to visit a link, afterwhich they promt you to log in your facebook account, using the exact same site you normally log in to and with a similiar address so you cant spot the scam.
*this really work very well. i used to play neopets when i was in secondary school and many of my friends fell for it.