Order of the Bath

This is one for the boys—not. We have discovered that it is mostly the girls who are caught up by the Farmville type scams but this time it is the boys using Facebook that have to look out. There is a very sophisticated worm about (a worm is like a virus but crawls through web sites rather than directly between PCs). If you see someone’s profile picture has become a rather curvaceous girl in a Bikini then *don’t* click on it. If you do, then three things will happen. First you will be taken to a web site which contains rather a lot of porn. Secondly, that web site will download a lot of nasty stuff to your computer such as programs that steal account details. Thirdly, your profile will be changed to include this picture so as to attract other mugs victims. I said sophisticated at the start because it uses a lot of different techniques to trap you, from the initial social engineering making you think with the wrong part of your body through to clickjacking which is a page layout technique where you think you are clicking on something innocent (ha!) but actually saying yes to something important hidden underneath. As Roger Thompson says in a parody of Trooper Truth, “Keep safe, folks.”

This entry was posted on 24 Nov 2009 at 08:48 by Rick and is filed under Miscellaneous, Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.