Facebook Responds to Security Vulnerability
8 08 2008MySpace gets a bad rap for spam profiles, while many believe that Facebook is relatively secure. But, are they really right? According to Facebook’s newest post, security chief Max Kelly has stated that a new worm is currently attacking Facebook.
“We spent most of last night working on a fix for a worm, which was targeting people on Facebook and placing messages on Walls urging users to view a video that pretends to be hosted on a Google or YouTube website. We’ve identified and blocked the ability to link to the malicious websites from anywhere on Facebook. Less than .002 percent of people on Facebook have been affected, all of whom we notified and suggested steps to remove the malware.”
In matter of fact, this worm has been widely reported in the virus new forums, as one of the well-established Internet security firms Kaspersky even purposely wrote an article to inform social networking users on such security vulnerability a week ago. This worm namely Net-Worm.Win32.Koobface.b, which targets Facebook users, creates spam messages to the Facebook users and its ultimate purpose is to urge the users to download a network worm that could potentially cause a huge loss to the users’ own machines .
With that so many features rendered by Facebook platform, and every complex piece of code probably has some vulnerability in it, it is wisely to listen to Facebook’s serious advice in their blog post. There are few important security measures that each one of us must take: report any spam message postings, never share your Facebook password, keep an eye and prioritize all the security flaw of your own computer’s operating system, and the last one, be aware of your surroundings in your online community.
[...] Security page. All those chain letters are hoax. We know Facebook will fix it, just like they fixed the worm attack recently. Meanwhile, you can join and donate to this cause, i.e. Stop Facebook Chain Letters if you want [...]
[...] I’m not sure whether this is a good sign for the Facebook and its users. More security issues would mean that Facebook is large enough as a viable target for the spammers or scammers. And on the other end, the new Koobface worm as reported by TrendMicro security blog more or less helped the users be prepared “not to” download any software that prompted on the site. This is due to the same bait can’t work twice to the same people as this malware is being promoted in a similar manner as happened before in August 2008. [...]