"You know how they say, "you can't live without love"? Well, oxygen is even more important"

House MD, TV character
(March 8, 1775, Joseph Priestley discovered oxygen gas)

A new Trojan is spreading across the Orkut social network

PandaLabs has detected a Trojan, called Orkut.AT, which uses the Orkut social network to spread. The process is as follows:

First, a profile appears in the targeted user's scrapbook, which contains an image from a YouTube video. The image is that of Giselle, a contestant in the Brazilian edition of the Big Brother reality TV show.

"That's the bait they use", explains Luis Corrons, Technical Director of PandaLabs. "Cyber-crooks take advantage of people's interest in celebrities to entice users to open files or click malicious links".

In this case, if the user clicks the link, a message is displayed informing them that the video can't be played as the corresponding codec is missing. However, if they try to download the codec, they will actually be downloading a copy of the Orkut.AT Trojan to their computers. To avoid raising suspicions, the Trojan redirects users to a web page where they can find the video in question.

Once in the targeted computer, the Trojan will post a malicious message in the scrapbook of all the victim's Orkut contacts.

"Social networks like Orkut connect millions of people. That's why cyber-crooks are turning to them to spread their creations, as they make an easy way to reach a lot of people in a very short period of time", says Corrons.

To avoid falling victim to one of these malicious codes, PandaLabs advises users to have an up-to-date security solution that can detect both known and unknown malware.

You can take a free trial of Panda Security's solutions at http://www.pandasecurity.com/spain/homeusers/downloads/evaluation/

As a precautionary measure, don't click any links received though social networks, even though they might seem to come from reliable sources. Type them directly into the browser's address bar.