Malwares again on a roll targetting Facebook

Trend Micro systems, a computer security firm warned social networking sites including Facebook about the recent malware, worms and rogue applications that may attack community websites. These recent malwares become biggest threat for most of the social networking applications. Although a number of the leading social networking sites have been targetted, the problem seems to be more serious for Facebook.

“We didn’t see a lot of these until recently,” said Jamz Yaneza, the threat research manager for Trend Micro. “So far, they don’t seem to be affecting users that much, although at least one Facebook group has been started by malware victims.”

The research manger of Trend Micro said that the worm is named as WORM_KOOBFACE and Koobface.AZ. The later worm seems to have spread to more than 300 servers, most of them are in Asia. According to the researchers, the worm should have infected atleast 20,000 PCs on each day.

Koobface.AZ and other rouge application can steal user information secretly. Apart from the problems caused by malware, worms or rouge applications, Trend Micro warned that social networking sites will be used by thieves and terrorists.

“But an even bigger problem, Yaneza warned, is that the trend toward open social-networking applications makes it easy for identity thieves and other cybercriminals to write malicious applications. Facebook is the highest-profile target because of its user base, he said, but it’s a problem faced by many other sites as well“.