One day like any other you log in to your Facebook account to check what's new, suddenly it goes 'ping' and a chat window opens. A friend writes 'funny picture' or 'hey, you look so weird in this video' followed by two smileys and a link, you get too curious and click on the link to see what your friend meant, in the worst case you're lost: both the picture and your friend's message are fake, organized cybercrime is behind this and other tricks.
Facebook is with over 500 million users the world's most popular social networking platform on the Internet and a perfect playground for cybercriminals to spread viruses and trojans. Using security 'holes' in the browser they get access to unprotected user login data and through
them they send a message with a link to the user's friends.
As soon as a friend clicks on the link, he comes to a modified website where a virus 'sneaks' in the users computer, his mission: get in that user's facebook account and send messages to his friends list, this way the virus reproduces itself and spreads around.
Facebook says: 'as soon as a message is sent around at a unnormal speed in a short period of time, it gets block automatically by our systems' but that doesn't seem to be enough, so how can you protect yourself without depending on Facebooks system?
-Keep your browser updated, Get the latest release of Firefox or Google Chrome, if you are using internet explorer 6 or 7 (yuk!!) get the newest release asap (or just uninstall it and get yourself one of the two mentioned before), a good antivirus program is a must have, (ask God... er, i mean Google for enlightenment)
But even the best antivirus program is not good enough, the best weapon you have is yourself, don't open everything that is sent to you, specially if you're not expecting such a message or if your 'friend' is just someone you just met online in a chatroom or over Facebook, make sure the message is coming from a trusted source before opening it or you may be the next victim :-)
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