"Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another"

Plato (428 BC-348 BC) ancient Greek philosopher
(September 6, 1811, James Melville Gilliss, US astronomer and founder of the United States Naval Observatory., was born)

Social engineering used to distribute malware on social networks

Social networks are services used by millions of users. Such popularity has not gone unnoticed by cyber-crooks who have started to distribute their creations through these pages more frequently.

Social engineering consists of claiming to offer news stories, erotic photos, etc. as bait to tempt users into clicking on links and downloading files to infect their computers with malware.

Twitter, one of the most famous microblogging services, was one of the latest networks to be attacked. PandaLabs, Panda Security's laboratory for detecting and analyzing malware, detected the Dadobra.AQI Trojan, distributed through Twitter using social engineering. In this case, the messages tempted users into clicking on a link to view supposed erotic photos of the Brazilian singer Kelly Key. On clicking the link users were redirected to a page which required they download a version of Adobe Flash to view the images. On doing so, a copy of the Trojan was downloaded onto their computer. Simultaneously, other banker Trojans were downloaded onto the system.

However, this was not an isolated case

In August 2008, PandaLabs detected the Boface.A worm, which spread through the MySpace and Facebook social networks. To do this, the worm inserted a link in comments posted in both networks to take users to a fake web page that resembled the actual YouTube site. When users tried to watch the video, as in the previous case, they were encouraged to install the latest Flash Player version. Similarly, when installing it, users were infected by the worm.

The worm used subjects like "Hello; You must see it!!! LOL. My friend catched you on hidden cam" to tempt users into watching the videos.

As you can see in this newsletter, in March, PandaLabs had already detected a worm that spread through the Orkut social network. It claimed to offer a video of Giselle, a participant in the Big Brother Brazil reality show.

For up-to-date computer security news go to the Panda Security Twitter.