A malware computer virus that hacks the bank details and drains the account has been found on the biggest social networking site, Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB).
Security experts Trend Micro found that some of the popular brand pages like U.S. National Football League had spam links posted from fake Facebook profiles. The malicious links are expected to have their origin from the Russian Business Network, which has been earlier accused of hacking identities and private information, says a report from DailyMail by Victoria Woollaston.
The security experts detected the malicious link from the page called ‘Bring the N.F.L to Los Angeles.’ The page has been removed now. Trend Micro believes more of such pages may be available, or they might have been spread inadvertently by Facebook friends.
Trojan Malware
Whenever a user clicks on the malicious link, the Trojan virus automatically gets installed on their computer. Trojan gets the name from the Greeks Trojan horses, which were able to get into the city of Troy undetected. After getting installed, the virus looks and steals any private information. The virus is able to hack a users login details, even if the details are not available in any of the documents on the PC. It gets them using keystroke logging or keylogging, which stores the keys that are being pressed on the keyboard.
Trojan is a six year old malware program that has recently surfaced again on Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) and other social network sites. The Zeus Trojan or ZBOT, which runs in the background and is virtually undetected, hacked million of PC’s worldwide. As per the reports, in the U.S. alone there were 3.6 million such cases.
ZBOT back again
Trend Micro told in a blog post that cases related to Zeus have been rising constantly this year and peaked last month. The ZBOT virus is known to affect PC’s running on Windows.
Five new types of the Zeus Trojan affecting BlackBerry and Android devices have also been discovered by Security experts at Kaspersky Lab.
A Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) spokesperson told that the site regularly scans for malware and has in place many security options including the Scan-and-Repair Malware scan. These security options are equipped to locate and remove the malware from mobile devices.
Eric Feinberg, founder of the advocacy group Fans Against Kounterfeit Enterprise (FAKE) said “If you really want to hack someone, the easiest place to start is a fake Facebook profile– it’s so simple, it’s stupid.”
“They’re not listening,” Mr. Feinberg added. “We need oversight on this.”
