The new variant of this Koobface worm now appears to be sending out spoofed e-mails pretending to be the facebook and twitter “password reset tool”.
When you get an e-mail from this virus/malware it will appear to look like the e-mails are sent by Facebook or Twitter (among others) asking you to reset your password using the confirmation tool.
This password reset tool will of course then trick you onto a different site to capture the e-mail address and password entered. These most likely get stored into a bigger database used to brute force online e-commerce accounts such as online banking and simple ebay/amazon/paypal accounts that have credit card information saved on record.
A few weeks ago we all saw this “I tagged you in a picture” spam going across Facebook, well that was the first attack to get Koobface installed on those computers by tricking the users into clicking yes on a fake Adobe Flash Player upgrade.
It would then send the “I tagged you” spam across friends and direct you onto a third-party website where you then got promoted to download what is labelled as an update to the Adobe Flash player, when in reality it’s the virus payload in it self.
Once your computer is infected it affects the registry and renders the machine useless. The virus will try to collect personal data such as credit card information e-mails and stored passwords while sending out spoofed e-mails pretending to be the Facebook/Twitter password reset tool.
Don’t get fooled with e-mails starting with “Dear User”, it’s all the same scam, big players like Facebook, PayPal, Amazon never start their e-mails with “Dear User”.
It’s also best to make sure the current password no longer works before using any type of online reset form, especially if you never asked for a reset. Facebook does have this security feature that will auto-reset your password on so many failed attempts. So make sure the password actually stopped working first!
Related off site articles:
- Virus Alert: Koobface worm targets Facebook, Twitter.
- Combat the Ever-Changing Facebook Virus Koobface.
Virus Alert: Koobface worm targets Facebook, Twitter
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