Koobface (Social Media Worms)

As social media is getting more and more popular, malware authors are using them to their advantage. The most common kind of worm which haunts social media spaces such as Facebook, Myspace etc uses the "trust factor" in a social network to its advantage. In the most common case, a victim clicks a link he receives from one of his friends, downloads and gets infected with the worm, and now in turn supports its propagation through his network. In some cases an actual download of the worm software happens, and in others XSS based worms are used.

Koobface is an example of the former - the video below demonstrates how Koobface can infect and spread in a social media network. This video was picked from the Webroot Threat Blog.

Vivek Ramachandran is a security evangelist and has been working in computer security related fields for the past 7 years. In 2007, Vivek spoke at world renowned conferences Defcon (WEP Cloaking Exposed) and Toorcon (The Caffe Latte Attack). The discovery of the Caffe Latte Attack was covered by CBS5 news, BBC online, Network World etc news agencies.In 2006, Vivek was announced as one of winners of the Microsoft Security Shootout contest held in India among 65,000 participants. He has also been a recipient of a Team Achievement at Cisco Systems for his work on 802.1x and Port Security modules on the Catalyst 6500 switches. Currently he spends all of his time maintaining Security- Freak.Net , SecurityTube.Net and is the co-founder of Axonize. Vivek, is a Bachelor in Electronics and Communications Engineering from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati.You can contact him at vivek[at]securitytube.net