The following article is from
Reuters. I only wish they had written it a couple of days earlier; then maybe I wouldn't have fallen in to the trap and had the security of my computer compromised and my Internet Explorer zapped. What I am trying to say is that my computer has been infected my a virus. I apologize to all of you who have contacted me, left comments, and posted stories that I have been unable to comment on. I hope to have things back up and running as soon as possible; but until then, please be patient with me.
Destructive
Koobface virus turns up on
FacebookThu Dec 4, 2008 4:52pm EST
By Jim
FinkleBOSTON (Reuters) -
Facebook's 120 million users are being targeted by a virus dubbed "
Koobface" that uses the social network's messaging system to infect PCs, then tries to gather sensitive information such as credit card numbers.
It is the latest attack by hackers increasingly looking to prey on users of social networking sites.
"A few other viruses have tried to use
Facebook in similar ways to propagate themselves,"
Facebook spokesman Barry
Schnitt said in an e-mail. He said a "very small percentage of users" had been affected by these viruses.
"It is on the rise, relative to other threats like e-mails," said Craig
Schmugar, a researcher with
McAfee Inc.
Koobface spreads by sending notes to friends of someone whose PC has been infected. The messages, with subject headers like, "You look just awesome in this new movie," direct recipients to a website where they are asked to download what it claims is an update of Adobe Systems Inc's Flash player.
If they download the software, users end up with an infected computer, which then takes users to contaminated sites when they try to use search engines from Google, Yahoo,
MSN and Live.com, according
McAfee.
McAfee warned in a blog entry on Wednesday that its researchers had discovered that
Koobface was making the rounds on
Facebook.
Facebook requires senders of messages within the network to be members and hides user data from people who do not have accounts, said Chris Boyd, a researcher with
FaceTime Security Labs. Because of that, users tend to be far less suspicious of messages they receive in the network.
"People tend to let their guard down. They think you've got to log in with an account, so there is no way that worms and other viruses could infect them," Boyd said.
Social network
MySpace, owned by News Corp, was hit by a version of
Koobface in August and used security technology to eradicate it, according to a company spokeswoman. The virus has not cropped up since then, she said.
Privately held
Facebook has told members to delete contaminated e-mails and has posted directions at
www.facebook.com/security on how to clean infected computers.
Richard
Larmer, chief executive of
RLM Public Relations in New York, said he threw out his PC after it became infected by
Koobface, which downloaded malicious software onto his PC. It was really bad. It destroyed my computer," he said.
McAfee has not yet identified the perpetrators behind
Koobface, who are improving the malicious software behind the virus in a bid to outsmart security at
Facebook and
MySpace.
"The people behind it are updating it, refining it, adding new functionalities," said
McAfee's Schmugar.
(Reporting by Jim
Finkle, Additional reporting by Emily Kaiser; Editing by Toni Reinhold)
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