A new virus named Koobface worm is propagating through social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, hi5, Bebo, Friendster and Twitter.
Internet users frequently visiting social networking sites beware! A new virus is propagating through these sites.
The virus named Koobface worm is propagating through social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, hi5, Bebo, Friendster and Twitter. The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (ICERT) recently issued an alert about Koobface which is said to be of very high severity.
The virus is sent to people’s website id on the social networking sites as spam message with a catchy subject, mostly about a private video, ‘My personal video’. The receiver is asked to click on the given link which connects him to a website designed to mislead the user into believing that he is connected to video portal YouTube.com. But in reality he lands on the site ‘YuoTube.com’.
The user is then asked to install .EXE file which the site claims will support the users machine help watch the video.
The .EXE file is not actual downloader of the Koobface but only a component of Koobface. Also the user is linked to fake webpage created which shows contents like private videos posted by people keeping the user glued to it and going ahead to try and download the video. After the execution of .EXE file the webpage shows an error message but infact drops and executes a copy of itself on the users machine which is now infected with the virus. Also the Koobface worm asks the user to solve simple problems such as breaking CAPCHAs.
The virus is now been installed into the user’s machine and has access to all the data stored in it. It automatically starts whenever the user starts the machine and it is linked to the Koobface website with the user having no idea about it.
E-security expert Vijay Mukhi said, “Such viruses once installed into the user machine sends all the data to the creator whenever the user is online. These viruses are generally created by people to make money, once they get confidential details such as bank passwords etc it can be used for phishing”.
He further added, “‘the user will only come to know about it when he loses money or some confidential or private information which is used to harm him in future”.
ICERT also advised people not to click on links received through mail by an unknown sender.
Virus attacks on government & social networking
Famous social networking sites like Twitter, facebook and Google were hacked on August 7 disrupting the wesbsites’ working for some period. Users could not log on to the websites, and everytime they tried they showed a connection error or connections being timed out. Hackers made Ddos attacks due to which machines infected with viruses are commanded to simultaeneously visit a website. It also caused the Twitter going offline temporarily and after being fixed up the access to the website was very slow. Experts fixed up the problem in some time on the same day after which millions of users could easily access the websites.
On July 8, websites of US stock exchange, the US treasury, the state department and the white house were attacked. A virus named MyDoom hit the websites and the attack was blamed on North Korea.
Last year the Eastern Railways website was hacked by a Trojan virus which paralysed the online system for nearly two and a half hours. Railway officials traced the attack to Toronto in Canada.
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