A lot of banks use a similar system labeled as a TAC (Transaction Authorisation Code) or similar when you want to carry out a transaction which involves moving money out from your account (bill payment, fund transfers etc).

Facebook began rolling out new service on Tuesday that allows people using public computers to log into the site without having to enter their regular password.

Instead, users can login with a one-time password that, upon request, Facebook zaps to their mobile phones. The temporary access code is good for 20 minutes only. The new feature is designed to prevent account compromises that result when credentials are entered into machines that have been compromised by keyloggers and similar types of malware.

“We’re launching one-time passwords to make it safer to use public computers in places like hotels, cafes or airports,” Jake Brill, a Facebook product manager, blogged here. “If you have any concerns about security of the computer you’re using while accessing Facebook, we can text you a one-time password to use instead of your regular password.”

I think it’s a useful thing for Facebook users on the move who may not want to use their proper password on a public computer in an airport or cybercafe for example as they may be infected with malware.

Of course the pessimists and conspiracy theorists will say Facebook is just running a ruse to gather more mobile phone numbers from their user base to leverage more data and improve their ability to suggest connections.

To use the service, users must first configure their accounts to work with a designated mobile phone number. When they text “otp” to 32665, they should immediately receive a password that’s good for the next 20 minutes. The feature is available to select Facebook users for now. Over the next few weeks, it will gradually become available to everyone.

Brill unveiled two other features that are also intended to give users more control over their accounts. One allows users to remotely sign out of accounts. It’s useful in cases when someone forgets to log off of a computer and only later realizes he’s still logged in. In the past, the person had to access the computer to be logged off, but the new service allows this to happen remotely. Users can check to see if they’re still logged in from their Facebook account settings page.

A third service will regularly prompt users to update their security information, Brill said. Facebook uses the information to verify users in the event a password is lost or compromised.

I’m not sure what country this service is rolling out in, but I’d guess it’s probably US-centric and will stay that way for some time. They should use an international number as it’s most likely you’d want to login from a publication location when traveling.

No doubt they’ll address some issues as for now the service is a testing phase and only available to certain users.

The other new security related features are remote log-out, which Gmail from Google has had forever – if you didn’t know about the feature just scroll to the very bottom of the Gmail window and you’ll see something like this:

This account is open in 1 other location (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx).
Last account activity: 2 hours ago on this computer.  Details

Source: The Register

Facebook has had a fair share of problems, being a large community of course it’s going to be a ripe target for spammers, scammers and malware distributors.

The latest to hit is a spam e-mail claiming to be from the Facebook team that actually spreads a nasty piece of malware called Bredolab. It’s also been observed the trojan will connect to additional servers to install more malware.

The ultimate goal as usual is to make the victims part of a botnet.

Researchers at several security firms have uncovered a spam campaign targeting Facebook users. The e-mails, which pose as communications from Facebook about password resets, contain a nasty downloader that ultimately makes users part of a notorious botnet.

Researchers at several security firms have tied the Bredolab Trojan to a spam campaign targeting Facebook users.

The malware is being blasted out by spammers in e-mails claiming to come from “The Facebook Team.” Inside the e-mails is a message that the recipient’s Facebook password has been changed. In order to get the new one, recipients are told to open the accompanying attachment containing the malware.

Researchers at Websense told eWEEK Oct. 27 that they have observed more than 350,000 of the messages. On the company’s blog, researchers explained that the malware connects to two servers to download additional malicious files. Among them is Pushdo, also known as Cutwail.

This spam campaign seems to be generating some fairly high levels of traffic meaning whoever is behind it is pretty serious and committed to this vector for disseminating malware.

Social engineering isn’t a new method for propagating malware as always the weakest link is never the technological barriers but is always the stupidity/greed/gullibility of humans.

You can ALWAYS hack the wetware.

“One of the first things we saw this Trojan horse download was the Pushdo bot which began spamming out more of these Facebook password reset emails,” according to M86 Security.

MX Logic noted that Bredolab bypasses firewalls by injecting its own code into the legitimate process svchost.exe and explorer.exe. It also contains anti-sandbox code to thwart researchers, and creates the following files: %AppData%\wiaservg.log, %Windir%\temp\wpv861256600826.exe and %Programs%\Startup\isqsys32.exe. Bredolab also creates the processes isqsys32.exe and svchost.exe.

Sophos is detecting the malware as Troj/BredoZp-M or Mal/Bredo-A.

“Don’t make life easy for the hackers hell-bent on infecting your computer, stealing your identity and emptying your bank account – exercise caution when you receive unsolicited emails and protect your computer with up-to-date security software,” Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, advised in a blog post.

It looks like a pretty advanced piece of malware code which evades firewall measures and even tries to thwart analysis by AV companies.

Anti sandbox code and process injection, these bad guys are getting smart.

That does not bode well for the average citizen.

Source: eWeek

You need to feed it biscuits (cookies) before you can do anything.

You can get the target’s cookie by sniffing, XSS, social engineering, ARP Poison-Sniffing, Scroogle search or however you like.

Once you have the cookies you can use FBController to have Full control over the target’s Facebook account.

Login to your Facebook account and sniff your own cookie OR collect a few live Facebook Biscuit/s of your Target/s.

Till now FBController version 1.0 uses your Target’s provided cookie and only :

A > Downloads the HomePage.
B > Allows you to Update the Target’s Wall and
C > Retrieve your Target’s Friend’s List

There are many APIs available to write apps and 3rd party Tools for FB in Java, Perl, .NET, etc.

FBConTroller was entirely written without knowing any of Facebook’s Dev API’s. Considering the above along with Facebook’s complexity, the next version might take some time to get released

You can download FBController here:

FBConTroller.RAR

Or read more here.