• The spokesperson for the company said that “a very small percentage” has been affected.
• ‘Koobface’ spreads through sending notes to friends that have been infected.
• MySpace was affected in August by a version of ‘Koobface’

As El Mundo has said this morning, the 120 million Facebook users are being targeted by a virus by the name of “Koobface” that uses the message system on the social network to infect computers and thus collect confidential information such as credit card numbers.

This is the last attack made by information processing pirates who seek to take advantage of the users of the social networking sites. “Other viruses have tried to use Facebook to spread viruses in similar ways” said Barry Schnitt, spokesperson of Facebook, in an email.

‘Koobface’ is a worm that spreads through the diverse services of the Internet such as IRC (Internet Chat Relay) or emails such as MultiSPAM. It finds the presence of archives or cookies connected with the social networking sites. In this case it finds them and alters the configuration of the browser and connects them to other sites where “malwares” will be downloaded. Schnitt indicated that “a very small percentage of users” have been affected by this virus. “This is going to increase, in relation to other threats such as (the ones that come from) emails”, declared Craig Schmugar, an investigator from McAfee.

‘Koobface’ spreads through sending notes to friends of someone that has been infected. The messages that are entitled with material such as “you look great in this new film”, where they are directed to another site where they are asked to update a copy of Flash from Adobe Systems.

If they download the software, the users will have their computers infected, and then it will lead users to contaminated sites when they try to use search engines: Google, Yahoo, MSN and Live.com, explained McAfee.

Facebook requires that the receivers of the messages inside the network will be members of this and hide data of the users that do not have accounts, explained Chris Boyd, an investigator of FaceTime Security Labs. Due to this the users tend to be a lot less distrustful of the messages that they receive on the Internet.

“The people tend to lower their guard. They believe that they have to be connected to their account so they think that there is no way that the worms or other viruses can infect them”, said Boyd. ”

The social networking site MySpace, property of News Corp, was affected in August by a version of Koobface, and the site used safety technology to delete it” according to a spokesperson of the company.

The business of private capital Facebook, told its members to delete contaminated emails and public instructions on http://www.facebook.com/security so they can clean the infected computers.

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