Friday, May 22, 2009

Facebook Viruses

I don't believe that you aren't familiar with FACEBOOK or that you don't have an account there. See. Each one of us have one or more accounts on facebook, even my 11 year old brother does. So what interests these young people that they spend hours facebooking. Well mainly because of its wide range of applications,facility to upload and share pictures,make friends,join groups etc. Its a lot better than orkut I guess. So with million and trillions of users, hackers have hit a great idea of infecting this social networking website as a great platform to infect people within seconds. I have decided to jot down some viruses I have personally seen there.

1. We really aren't sure about the FB applications now that whether they were created by the FB team or some evil kid with evil intentions,as anyone can create an application on FB now. Have you ever seen "My Secret Crush". It redirects you to some other website which automatically downloads an exe file on your computer and infects it. This is known as drive by download.So your curiousty of finding out your secret crush is destroyed:P.

2. Not all ads displayed on FB are authenticated. As FB does not display ads itself,rather advertisers display their ads not knowing which are malicious.

3. Koobface worm which sends you a msg in your inbox with silly titles so as to social engineer you and pretending to be from one of your friends. so as soon as you have read it,all your personal details are hacked or in case you have an invitation for a video, you get redirected to install a flash player which actually is some malicious virus that infects your computer.

So I guess FB isn't safe at all. As we cannot tell apart the part that's safe from the one that is malicious. Moreover peoples' tendency to click such things is quite high. FB developers gotta do something.

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