Posts Tagged ‘social networking’

Koobface malware attack on Twitter

Twit­ter has pos­ted a war­ning con­cer­ning koob­face infec­tions.  If their sys­tem detects your PC sen­ding out these bogus tweets they will sus­pend your account.

Accor­ding to wiki­pe­dia Koob­face is:

Koob­face, an ana­gram of Face­book (“face” and “book” change order and “koob” is “book” in reverse), is a com­pu­ter worm that tar­gets the users of the social net­wor­king web­si­tes Face­book, MyS­pace ^[1], hi5, Bebo, Friends­ter and Twit­ter^[2]. Koob­face ulti­ma­tely attempts, upon suc­cess­ful infec­tion, to gather sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion from the vic­tims such as cre­dit card numbers.

Koob­face spreads by deli­ve­ring Face­book mes­sa­ges to peo­ple that are ‘friends’ of someone on Face­book whose com­pu­ter has already been infec­ted. The mes­sa­ges con­tain inno­cuous sub­ject hea­ders such as “Paris Hil­ton Tos­ses Dwarf On The Street”, “LOL”, and “My friend catched [sic] you on hid­den cam”. Upon receipt, the mes­sage directs the reci­pients to a third-party web­site unaf­fi­lia­ted with Face­book where they are promp­ted to down­load what is pur­por­ted to be an update of the Adobe Flash pla­yer. If they down­load and exe­cute the file, they will infect their com­pu­ter with Koob­face. Koob­face then com­man­deers their sur­fing acti­vi­ties and directs users to con­ta­mi­na­ted web­si­tes when they attempt to access search engi­nes like Goo­gle, Yahoo, and Bing.

Please remem­ber to keep your Anti Virus soft­ware updated.

OpenDNS — Review and Recommendation

For those of you that have chil­dren and want to block out spe­ci­fic types of sites, OpenDNS is for you.

It is a free ser­vice that per­forms look up of web­site address, not to be con­fu­sed with email addres­ses. Since it runs so many inqui­ries, it builds up a very large cache cut­ting down on the amount of time it takes to find addres­ses you have not visi­ted in the past.

Not only does it speed up your sur­fing of the web, it has a great con­tent fil­te­ring por­tion. You can block by gene­ral groups: Adult, Social Net­wor­king, Hate, Guns, Sports, Shop­ping, as many as you wish.

If one of the your favo­rite sites does get bloc­ked, you can go in and make an excep­tion that will allow this site to be viewed.

They have great ins­truc­tions that walk you through set­ting up the ser­vice on your net­work, so that all of your com­pu­ters get these set­tings, or on each indi­vi­dual com­pu­ters so that you can lock down a child’s indi­vi­dual com­pu­ter while yours are wide open.

If you do run into pro­blems set­ting these up, I will be more then happy to assist with this.

You can find out more at http://www.opendns.com.

- Diego