Saturday, August 2, 2008

Malware Spreads In Social Networking Services

Security company Kaspersky Lab warns about new worm named as Koobface which uses social networking services, Facebook and MySpace to spread itself. Thus far four different variants of the worm exist.

Koobface makes infected systems part of botnet which clients spread malware links using friends lists of MySpace & Facebook. "The messages and comments include texts such as Paris Hilton Tosses Dwarf On The Street; Examiners Caught Downloading Grades From The Internet; Hello; You must see it!!! LOL. My friend catched you on hidden cam; Is it really celebrity? Funny Moments and many others."

Links in messages guide user to site containing video clip. If the user tries to watch the clip (s)he's been shown a message that asks to get the latest version of Flash Player to be able to watch the clip. Instead of the latest version of Flash Player, a file named as codesetup.exe is downloaded to the victim machine. That file is actually Koobface worm.

“Unfortunately, users are very trusting of messages left by 'friends' on social networking sites. So the likelihood of a user clicking on a link like this is very high. At the beginning of 2008 we predicted that we'd see an increase in cybercriminals exploiting MySpace, Facebook and similar sites, and we're now seeing evidence of this. I'm sure that this is simply the first step, and that virus writers will continue to target these resources with increased intensity”, says Alexander Gostev, Senior Virus Analyst at Kaspersky Lab.

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