Welcome Guest. | Log In | Register | Membership Benefits

Facebook Hit By Classic Worm Attack

Zeus Trojan spreads when user views 'photos'; Facebook now blocking malicious domains spreading the attack

Nov 29, 2011 | 06:20 PM | 

By Kelly Jackson Higgins
Dark Reading
A worm spreading via Facebook infects victims with a variant of the dangerous Zeus Trojan. The attack, which was first discovered by researchers at CSIS in Denmark, spreads via phony posts from an infected Facebook user's account that pretends to contain photos.

Like previous Facebook scams, it uses stolen account credentials to log in and then spam the victim account's "Friends" with the malicious posts. While a screenshot of the file appears to have a .jpg suffix, it's really a malicious screensaver file, according to Jovi Umawing, a security expert at GFI Software.

"Once run, it drops a cocktail of malicious files onto the system, including ZeuS, a popular Trojan spyware capable of stealing user information from infected systems," Umawing wrote in a blog post today. "The worm is also found to have anti-VM capabilities, making it useless to execute and test in a virtual environment, such as Oracle VM VirtualBox and VMWare."

Facebook has blocked the offending domains spreading the Trojan. "We are constantly monitoring the situation and are in the process of blocking domains as we discover them. We have internal systems in place configured specifically to monitor for variations of the spam and are working with others across the industry to pursue both technical and legal avenues to fight the bug," a Facebook spokesperson says.

The worm plays perfectly into Facebook's environment, security experts say.

"Facebook is built to easily allow people to share pictures, videos, and other content -- and people trust what they are receiving from their friends," says Mike Geide, senior security researcher at Zscaler ThreatLabZ Malware. "[For example], this recent example can take advantage of the sharing mechanisms and user's trust of their friends within social networking."

Meanwhile, new research published today from Norman ASA found that Zeus-based attacks are actually on the decline this year: While there were 20,000 Zeus-related incidents in January, according to Norman, there were "nearly negligible levels" of Zeus threats discovered in September.

Have a comment on this story? Please click "Add Your Comment" below. If you'd like to contact Dark Reading's editors directly, send us a message.



Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

Dark Reading encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, Dark Reading moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. Dark Reading further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
Subscribe to RSS



Cloud Security Reports

report Monitoring And Measuring Cloud Providers' Security Performance
There is no ignoring the cloud, which means that IT professionals must find ways to monitor and measure the performance of cloud providers. While moving even in part to a cloud model is a big change for many reasons, the most significant difference is a loss of direct control. Just as security groups often struggle with managing security inside a corporation when in a governance role, we struggle even more with governing the security of assets that no longer sit within our own data centers. The challenge is to develop and implement a strong governance model for these cloud offerings that ensures that security is part of the conversation.

report How to Manage Identity in the Public Cloud
Use of the public cloud for enterprise applications complicates what was already a complicated task: identity management. As companies increase their use of cloud-based applications, IT and security professionals must make some tough and far-reaching decisions about how to provision, deprovision and otherwise manage user access. This Dark Reading report examines the options and provides recommendations for determining which one is right for your organization.

report Spot Trouble In The Cloud: Adapting Security Monitoring & Incident Response.
Security monitoring, incident response and forensics are essential, even in the cloud. But the cloud by definition implies relinquishing at least some control, which can make these practices problematic. In this report, we identify the challenges of detecting and responding to security issues in the cloud and discuss the most effective ways to address them.

Other reports from the Cloud Security Tech Center:




Featured Webcasts
Featured Whitepapers
Featured Reports