Koobface worm targets facebook

If you are regular on facebook, it is time for you to be a bit more cautious now. Facebook is the largest social network on web and it is no alien to worms anymore. ‘Koobface’ is the name of the worm, not sure what made the author of the worm to name it that way. Reversed half of ‘facebook’ and then retained the ‘face’ thereafter! Looks like that persons intent is to make facebook an unpopular place.Well, you might have a question – why would one target facebook. There wouldn’t be much ‘useful’ user info on facebook unless one can relate among friends and family. Facebook uses way too many apps built by externals and many of these try to link one user with other users by accessing respective contact list to populate a network. Whatever may be the ‘data’ relation, we as end users need to be more careful. Let us take a deep look at what this Koobface is all about.

Similar to other worms, Koobface tricks facebook users and hijacks their account. This is accomplished by sending user a fake facebook email that appears to be from one of the contact/friends which would be  a link to a fake youtube video. Upon clicking this link, it takes user to a malicious site that prompts to install an upgrade for flashplayer or some other plugin. If user does so, the worm gets into the computer and starts sending messages to your friends and attempting to infect them. It also sends and receives information from an infected machine by connecting to several servers, which in turn allows hackers to execute commands on the affected machine. What it means is that Koobface worm doesn’t bother Facebook much but it is all about creating a zombie computer and there by affecting many more!

The news on the internet suggests that this worm is not only limited to facebook, but extends itself to many popular networks like Friendster, Bebo, MySpace, LiveJournal, Hi5 etc., To keep yourself safe from these kind of worms, always be careful when you are propmpted to install some plugins/upgrades to view the content. Even if something appears to have come from a well known friend, remember that their account might have been infected and the message you received may not have actually be from them. Even if that interests you very much always download authentic plugins/upgrades directly from respective well known sites.