43,000 malicious files relating to social networking sites collected by KL in 2008
Speaking at Syria's 5th ICT Security Forum, the delegate of Kaspersky Lab, a leading developer of secure content management solutions, Stefan Tanase, Senior Regional Researcher, EEMEA Research Center, Kaspersky Lab Global Research and Analysis Team, presented the dangers of emerging threats and web based attacks that remain the favourite method used by cybercriminals in the web 2.0 world.
Vulnerabilities can enable cybercriminals to evade protection installed on the machine and attack the computer. As a rule, this is true for newly-identified vulnerabilities, for which patches have not yet been created - these are targeted by so-called zero-day attacks.
Kaspersky Lab Global Research and Analysis Team, said that in 2009 social networking sites will be used by around 80 per cent of all Internet users, the equivalent of more than one billion people.
"The growing popularity of social networking sites has not gone unnoticed by cybercriminals. Such sites became a hotbed of malware and spam and another source of illegal earnings on the Internet. The Kaspersky Lab collection doubled in size in just one year, from 20,000 to more than 43,000 malware samples relating to social networking sites in 2008." said Tanase.
According to the Kaspersky Lab expert, major Web 2.0 platforms such as Facebook or Twitter are highly targeted with malware attacks and end-users need to be aware of the risks and be ready to take precautionary measures to protect themselves.
"Kaspersky Lab saw an explosion of Koobface modifications throughout the month of June, due to summer vacations across the northern hemisphere. In just one month, the number of variants detected jumped from 350 at the beginning of June 2009 to more than 1000 at the beginning of July 2009," highlighted Tanase.
The Koobface worm is spreading through legitimate users' profiles to all their friends' accounts. Comments and messages sent by the worm contain a link to a fake YouTube style website which invites users to download a "new version of Flash Player". The worm, rather than a media player, is then downloaded to victim machines. Once a user is infected, he or she will start spreading such messages to his or her friends. In past year, the functionality of the worm has been extended. Koobface is now targeting more social networking websites like Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, Bebo, Tagged, Netlog and, most recently, Twitter.
During his presentation, Tanase also gave few precautionary tips to users, listing being cautious when opening links coming through suspicious messages, even if the sender is one of their trusted Facebook friends, using either Internet Explorer 7 running in protected mode or Firefox with NoScript installed and divulging as little personal information as possible and without giving out information on home address, phone number or other private details.
Tanase concluded by stating that social network users must update regularly their antivirus software to prevent new versions of malware from attacking their computer.
Kaspersky Lab users running any of the Company's current anti-malware products are fully protected from all known variants of Net-Worm.Win32.Koobface as their global team of analysts are keeping a close eye on all threats coming from the social networking space, monitoring the malicious activity and constantly updating the protection customers receive.
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© Press Release 2009
