Phishing trap users Facebook (Koobface worm )

Internet users have had their Facebook account after being hacked victims of an e-mail phishing. Compromised accounts were then used to send phishing messages to other users.
Facebook's popularity among Internet users (about 200 million users) encourages the pirates to be the target of their attacks. If the sites remain the bank first targeted by phishing operations, they drained a high traffic like Facebook are no longer spared.
A spokesman for the social network, Barry Schnitt, has revealed that a phishing attack was directed against Thursday May 14 users Facebook. In classic, hackers have sent many emails to be presented to recipients suggest that they were sent by Facebook.
Phishing objective: to prepare a campaign of spam
These fraudulent messages inciting people to connect to them to modify certain data. A link in the email redirect, not to the site of Facebook, but to a page make-up the image of the social network, and hosted on areas controlled by pirates.
Users trapped phishing then entered their access codes to Facebook. These data could be stolen and used to connect to the accounts now vulnerable. The pirates were able to send phishing messages to friends of users already abused.
Barry Schnitt did not specify how many accounts were affected by the attack. Compromised accounts have been blocked by Facebook, in particular to allow victims to change their identities and prevent any further fraudulent access by third parties.
Web 2.0 sites victims of viruses and spam
For the security team with Facebook, the phishing campaign was intended primarily to gather login to, secondly, to send spam messages to users of the service.
This is not the first time that Facebook is the target of phishing. In October 2008 already, the editor BitDefender detected a campaign against users of the website, but then via instant messaging. MySpace also has to deal with spam and phishing. The international community had obtained the conviction of spammer to pay a fine of over $ 200 million.
Besides these threats, so-called Web 2.0 sites, including Twitter, are sometimes the target of virus attack. Two worms have been spread on Twitter. In 2008, the virus was spreading Koobface on Facebook. The same year, a Trojan horse designed MySpace.