Two of the biggest social media sites, MySpace and Facebook, have recently faced a worm which has offered people a video but underhandedly inserts a Trojan into their vulnerable systems.
This social media phenomenon has been bound to catch the attention of vicious hackers and criminals. Especially because many younger users are may not be as cautious in clicking on flashing links or pop-ups. This has contributed to the most recent malware problem circulating the internet.
The worm has been identified as “Networm.Win32.Koobface.a.” and “Networm.Win32.Koobface.b”. Each of these viruses creates spam among comments and a link to the video originally selected. The link attached to the spam comments goes to a .pl site and generates a pop up alert that notifies the viewer of a necessary upgraded. If taken a step further, the worm is then inserted onto the computer. After the worm is in place is makes the PC a botnetted device and the Trojans have the ability to upload modules from this machine to others.
Authored by E. Laing, an associate of a network cables distributor
