Beware Your Friends: Worm targets Facebook, MySpace

by Jordan Yerman | August 2, 2008 at 08:01 am

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Leave it to malware creators to turn your Facebook session into a remake of The Thing. In this case, a new work replicates by nesting in a Facebook or MySpace account and then sending out copies of itself via the PM function. That video it's sending? Nope, not a video. Makes me want to grow a big ol' beard and start spraying my computer with gasoline.

When infected machines log onto the social networks the next time their computers automatically send the malicious messages out to new victims grabbed from the friend list, said Ryan Naraine, security evangelist at Kaspersky.

"We've seen these types of worms before, typically around MySpace," he said. "People are more trusting of things they receive from a friend," and many people don't recognize that what they are downloading isn't a legitimate Flash Player file, but a malicious program.