A new Trojan is spreading across the Orkut social network

http://www.pandasecurity.com/emailhtml/oxygen/030808_ENG_in.htm

ενημέρωση για νέο trojan από την panda software

"You know how they say, "you can't live without love"? Well, oxygen is even more important"

House MD, TV character
(March 8, 1775, Joseph Priestley discovered oxygen gas)

A new Trojan is spreading across the Orkut social network

PandaLabs has detected a Trojan, called Orkut.AT, which uses the Orkut social network to spread. The process is as follows:

First, a profile appears in the targeted user's scrapbook, which contains an image from a YouTube video. The image is that of Giselle, a contestant in the Brazilian edition of the Big Brother reality TV show.

"That's the bait they use", explains Luis Corrons, Technical Director of PandaLabs. "Cyber-crooks take advantage of people's interest in celebrities to entice users to open files or click malicious links".

In this case, if the user clicks the link, a message is displayed informing them that the video can't be played as the corresponding codec is missing. However, if they try to download the codec, they will actually be downloading a copy of the Orkut.AT Trojan to their computers. To avoid raising suspicions, the Trojan redirects users to a web page where they can find the video in question.

Once in the targeted computer, the Trojan will post a malicious message in the scrapbook of all the victim's Orkut contacts.

"Social networks like Orkut connect millions of people. That's why cyber-crooks are turning to them to spread their creations, as they make an easy way to reach a lot of people in a very short period of time", says Corrons.

To avoid falling victim to one of these malicious codes, PandaLabs advises users to have an up-to-date security solution that can detect both known and unknown malware.

You can take a free trial of Panda Security's solutions at http://www.pandasecurity.com/spain/homeusers/downloads/evaluation/

As a precautionary measure, don't click any links received though social networks, even though they might seem to come from reliable sources. Type them directly into the browser's address bar.