Facebook worm is taking over social networks
Posted by Manuela Barreto @ December 5th, 2008 in Social Marketing
Attention SN users, not everything revolving social networks is fun and beautiful.
The famous worm detected in late August is still wandering the Facebook grounds along those of other social websites. The worm is known as Koobface and it’s a menace.
The virus seems to be spreading out quite fast and the trick lies in that it uses the same poor, colloquial language Facebookers use to communicate with their friends. It resurfaces through subject lines like ‘Hey‘, ‘Hi friend‘ or ‘you look so funny in your video‘, as explained by TechCrunch, and contain a link to a video that claims to feature the recepient in some way.
The video never loads, instead a sort of ‘get the latest Flash Player’ message appears which then forces the user to download the malware. Once malware is into the system it begins generating error messages in the attempts to detect Facebook user ID cookies.
The message to all Facebook and social networkers: DO NOT open unknown messages or email attachments, specially from strangers as to avoid the virus from spreading. It could be quite caotic having 120 million Facebook users affected by Koobface, be cautious and have some limits as to how ’social’ you should be on these networks.
Should your computer be infected with Koobface, Facebook recommends resetting your password and running a safe anti-virus software to kill the virus.
For more details check out ZDNet.
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Comments
Tim Reynolds
December 7th, 2008
Nice post. Thank you for the info. Keep it up.
m.barreto
December 11th, 2008
Hi,
No problem, thanks for stopping by Tim!
Draven Orr
March 4th, 2009
I use facebook but till I not get any message of this kind and if I will get any message of this kind I will ignore that.
Kurt Carney
March 4th, 2009
One more reason to use a mac ;)
m.barreto
March 4th, 2009
there you go! I fully agree, Kurt ;-)