Agape Blog

Online frauds have increased and continues to increase at a rapid rate. One of the ways that the spammers have adopted recently is by targetting the social networking sites.

Initially, Orkut was a very large breeding ground for virus attacks. But now it has moved to MySpace and Facebook. In what is seen as a first-of-its kind attack on the social networking site Facebook, spammers have begun using two internet protocol (IP) addresses to infect unsuspecting users with a Trojan virus. The virus is disguised in a manner that entices the user as it is masquerading as official emails sent by the popular Web 2.0 social-networking site. When a user is added to another user’s friend list on the social network, as protocol Facebook sends an email to notify their users of this. However, the spammers included a zip attachment that purports to contain a picture in order to entice the recipient to double-click on it. The attached file is actually a Trojan horse, which is a virus that can corrupt the hard disk of the victim. This email is sent from a domain that closely resembles facebookmail.com, an official domain used by Facebook to notify its users.

One IP address is used to send the spam, while the other directs the user to attack site. This makes it difficult for the site vendor to block the malicious spam easily. Earlier, when spammers used one IP address to launch a spam or phishing attack, vendors found it easy to block the lone address. But with two IP addresses being the norm of the day, it is an indication that the spammers are now more sophisticated in their modus operandi.