Facebook worm is taking over social networks

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.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 5th, 2008 at 6:32 pm and is filed under Social Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.