I’m seeing a lot of articles about Koobface, trojan horse malicious software that was designed to travel from user to user via Facebook. You’d get a message from one of your Facebook friends mentioning a video allegedly starring you. When you click on the link, you are taken to a site that gives a message saying that you need an updated Flash player and asks you to upgrade. That upgrade is the trojan. I’m guessing that this targeted Windows users but I haven’t seen any confirmation of that because coverage of these kinds of issues tends to be lacking.

Back in August, I reported several messages to Facebook regarding this but their response was just to tell me that my friends had a virus and to contact the friends about it.  It would have been more effective if Facebook had dealt with this given how widespread it was. (I saw mention of it on Twitter too). They would have known which users were infected by pattern of the messages. They also could have let those users know that they were infected and deleted some of the offending messages before others were infected.  It could have been an automated type of process that most likely would have saved tech support hours on this issue. Given that these kinds of incidents have been happening on MySpace forever, Facebook should have been more prepared to handle this situation.

While I think Facebook could have been more helpful in curbing, the “outbreak� it is ultimately up to computer users to be more aware of the sites they go to and what they are installing on their PCs. While some trojans are relatively harmless, there are others out to steal information about your identity and financial accounts. Installing some seemingly harmless application could leave you with an empty bank account.

Photo by Frank K.

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