Facebook Worm Koobface Dupes British SMEs

A new survey on small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in UK has found that according to almost 40% of respondents, a malware assault has sometime previously victimized their organization, yet a lot of SMEs continue to make fundamental errors, which in course of time endanger their businesses. SME WEB published this in news on April 7, 2011.

Says Director Clodagh Murphy for 'Eclipse' an Internet Service Provider, SMEs, which don't take their IT security seriously, can face severe financial consequences. Computer Weekly published this on April 7, 2011.

Furthermore, the study found that because of an absence of wariness regarding the PC worm Koobface, which targeted Facebook, 52% of those questioned potentially put their organizations in danger.

Additionally as per the study, over 50% of respondents had the notion that Koobface was a website for social networking, while according to another 13%, the worm, which's a Facebook anagram for attacking the social website, represents one cartoon character that appears on a kids' program on TV.

Indeed, merely 30% of those polled understood that Koobface had the potential to really contaminate their PCs. For, they knew that Koobface proliferated via sending messages to the accounts of all the contacts on a Facebook member's friends list after first infecting that member himself. Computer Weekly reported this in news on April 6, 2011.

In fact, in the case of Koobface, an end-user normally gets one web-link from someone known to him stating that he's sending a movie file, which can be viewed only if the user downloads a particular plug-in/codec/program. But when the program is loaded onto the PC, it captures that user's credentials as well as further proliferates onto other accounts of his friends.

Remarking about the aforementioned situation, Eclipse's director said that it wasn't new to have online crooks employ social engineering tactics for duping unwitting people as well as contaminating them with malware. Hence, as people increasingly accessed Facebook at their places of work, it was essential that organizations became watchful of the impact Koobface or similar threats might impose on their regular entrepreneurial activities, stated SCMagazine in news on April 7, 2011.

Related article: Facebook Users Should be Careful of a Computer Virus

» SPAMfighter News - 4/18/2011