There is a new kid in town, and yeah anti-virus researchers are on the run against the makers of this virus which has started to run rampant on Facebook.

Facebook spokesperson just said that the virus known as koobface has just infected a very small percentage of users on facebook.

Yeah, of course it is because its just starting to propagate on other unexpecting users that doesn’t know anything about this.

Koobface spreads thru notes by someone whose computer was infected with that virus, with a common header subject like “You look just awesome in this new movie…” wherein when clicked will redirect a user to a page where the individual will be informed about a new update for Adobe’s flash player and would be asked to download a program masked as an update. Full story here

Once it is downloaded, users don’t need to run the program, a mere existence of it on the user’s pc infects it.

Effects of Koobface Virus

— It redirects users to contaminated sites when using search engines such as google, yahoo, msn and Live.com

— it tries to gather sensitive data such as credit card numbers and such.

How to prevent it

Always be aware of what you are asked to download. If you aren’t going to download anything but was asked to, then there is a big chance that the file to be downloaded would be infected.

Always run a good anti-virus scanner. Free anti-virus scanners are yeah…Free but are you sure you are protected from it? Plus make sure that your anti-virus scanner is always updated. Nothing beats an updated anti-virus program.

Is Friendster next?

Myspace was hit by a similar kind of virus a few months ago, but was able to update its security immediately that is why it was prevented. Now facebook is on the list, yeah there are also Filipinos on Facebook but more on Friendster.

Hmm, there are a lot less people who are using Friendster and are using the same pc for online shopping using credit cards rather than other users from bigger social networking sites like the mentioned two.

But who knows? Friendster might be next? Heads up people!

There are many ignorant / casual Filipino users who surf the net just for Friendster, who just do the “click here, click there, click everywhere” thing that makes Pinoys a lot more susceptible to this kind of virus.

Yeah I’m talking about Filipinos, why? Well remember the Friendster outage phenomenon around a month ago? Remember what happened to computer shops here in our country? During that time, most of the computer shops are empty just because Friendster was down. Imagine that? Story here.

Heads up people!

No Related Posts.