As Facebook works to make itself more relevant and timely for its growing member base with a profile page makeover, attackers seem to be working overtime to steal the identities of the friends, fans and brands that connect though the social-networking site.
Indeed, Facebook has seen five different security threats in the past week. According to Trend Micro, four new hoax applications are attempting to trick members into divulging their usernames and passwords. And a new variant of the Koobface worm is running wild on the site, installing malware on the computers of victims who click on a link to a fake YouTube video.
The Koobface worm is perilous. It can be dropped by other malware and downloaded unknowingly by a user when visiting malicious Web sites, Trend Micro intelligence. When attackers do the malware, it searches for cookies made by online social networks. The latest variant is targeting Facebook, but before variants have also plagued MySpace.
Koobface’s Wicked Agenda
Once Koobface finds the social-networking cookies, it makes a DNS query to check IP addresses that correspond to remote domains. Trend Micro clarifies that those servers can send and receive information about the affected apparatus. Once connected, the malicious user can remotely perform commands on the victim’s apparatus.
“Once cookies related to the monitored social-networking Web sites are located, it connects to these Web sites using the user log-in session stored in the cookies. It then navigates owing to pages to search for the user’s friends. If a friend has been located, it sends an HTTP POST request to the server,” Trend Micro intelligence.
Ultimately, the worm’s agenda is to transform the victim’s notebook into a zombie and form botnets for malicious purposes. Koobface attempts to do this by composing a message and sending it to the user’s friends. The message contains a link to a Web site where a copy of the worm can be downloaded by unsuspecting friends. And the cycle repeats itself.
An Attractive Face(book)
Malware authors are investing more energy in Facebook and other social-networking sites because that effort pays off, according to Michael Argast, a security analyst at Sophos. Facebook lonely has more than 175 million users, which makes it an attractive target.
“Many notebook users have been conditioned not to open an attachment from an e-mail or click a link found within, but won’t reflect double about checking out a hot new video associated to by a trusted friend on Facebook,” Argast said.
Argast called the Koobface worm a mix of something ancient and something new. The new is using social networks as a method to spread malware. The ancient is using fake codec Trojans associated to a saucy video to induce the user to install the malware.
Argast said people can protect themselves by running up-to-date antivirus software, restricting which Facebook applications they install, thinking double before clicking on links from friends and never, never installing a codec from some random Web site in the hopes of catching some celebrity in a compromised situation.
“I would expect to see more attacks on Facebook,” Argast said. “As long as this is a thriving propagation method, the terrible guys will double down and invest more. They are entirely motivated by financial gain. If it pays, they’ll continue to romp in your social playgrounds.”
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