There have been quite a few security concerns with Facebook, especially with the amount of personal information it collects on it’s users.

Of course there is Koobface and it’s many variants which have been propagating all kinds of spam through Facebook wall posts and messages.

I’m glad someone is offering a solution for free, yes they benefit from it too by being able to gather data on Facebook activity and the quantity of malicious posts occurring on Facebook.

Security vendor Websense if offering Facebook users and businesses a new free ‘firewall’ service that monitors their pages for malicious posts, links and spam.

Defensio 2.0 checks all posts to Facebook in real time against Websense’s ThreatSeeker Network, a database of problem URLs, before deciding whether to categorise a post as malicious or unwanted. This also draws from data gathered by US ISP Radialpoint and URL shortening service bit.ly before performing further heuristic analysis as a final check.

If a bad post is detected, the system logs and informs the user who makes the final decision. As with the original Defensio system – acquired a year ago when Websense bought the company of the same name – it can also monitor web pages for rogue posting, pre-emptively blocking those it deems unwanted.

“We are seeing real threats to Facebook such as Koobface,” said Websense senior research manager, Carl Leonard.

It seems to work on a ‘moderation’ model so if the software detects any suspicious automated messages/links or other dodgy activity it will block the post/message and allow the user to approve/deny the request.

But then it’s only going to be effective if take-up is good amongst the non-tech savvy users where the problems tend to be a lot more common.

Sadly this seems highly unlikely as only people who read sites like this will know about it, unless it get’s heavily promoted on Facebook..but then you have to contend with ad-blindness problems.

According to Leonard, an advantage of Web 2.0 monitoring was that it gave security companies a way of following criminals inside the otherwise closed world of social media, something that many security vendors can’t yet do. “We can have visibility into threats on these social networks, and have a fantastic feed of information that can benefit all our customers,” he said.

Leonard was not able to say when or if the monitoring might be available other social media sites or feeds such as twitter, where rogue behaviour can be difficult to spot.

The service is free for anyone with fewer than 50,000 posts per month, and for companies with 15 employees of less. For professional sites or sites with larger volumes of posts, the service starts at $5 (£3) per month, per site.

It’s free for most people, I’d imagine very few companies are making 1500 posts per day! Even if you need to pay it’s pretty cheap.

I hope to see more initiatives from companies like this, and ideally someone working with Facebook themselves to increase pro-active security measures on the site.

Obviously that’s not their first priority and with the recent brouhaha about their new privacy terms and default settings..you should be concerned about what information of yours they intend to utilise.

Source: Network World

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

It makes sense, spammers will follow whatever is popular, wherever the social mass is at and reading they will bombard.

In the earlier days Myspace was a big target, now they are moving on to other sites such as Facebook. Social networking sites are an ideal place for spammers as they can exploit the trust between ‘friends’ in the system to deliver more compelling messages.

I personally haven’t seen any spam on Facebook yet, but I’m outside of the US, rather selective about my friends, networks and the information I publish there.

Social networking sites have become the new front in the war against spam, according to security watchers.

In the six months leading up to March 2008, social networking sites saw a four-fold growth in the amount of spam on their network. At several major social networking sites, 30 per cent of new accounts created are automated fraudulent ‘zombie’ accounts, designed to be used for spam and other malicious attacks, according to anti-spam firm Cloudmark.

JF Sullivan, VP of marketing at Cloudmark, said the type of spam advertised through social networks is the same type as that advertised by email spam and punted by much the same people. “There’s an implicit trust in social networking. People don’t think they’re going to be attacked with spam,” Sullivan told El Reg. “People don’t trust email anymore. Spammers are following peoples’ online habits.”

It’s scary though that 30% of new accounts are created for spam purposes, that’s a huge number! I imagine it’s a fairly simple process to search for accounts with a generated list of names and just ass them all as friends…then spam them with invites to few phishing sites.

Sometimes flaws in the sites can be used to generate messages that appear to be from people’s other friends.

Social networking spam can be messages between users or posts to walls or other similar applications. Social network spammers most often hijack accounts using fake log-in pages. Phishing-like tactics, password guessing and the use of Trojans to capture keystrokes are also in play.

Junk messages, rigged to appear as though they came from their friends, are more likely to be acted on by recipients on social networking sites compared to the same messages received by email. Social network spammers try to recruit friends by posting profile pictures that depict them as attractive young women. By recruiting people into their groups or networks it’s easier for spammers to subsequently send them spam.

All the major social networks have a problem with spam, according to Sullivan, with volumes of spam ranging from 15 to 30 per cent.

So watch your wall, it might be getting spammed soon. It’s true too that the demographic of most social networking sites is quite low on a technological level so it’s very likely that it would be easy to socially engineer them into clicking something.

Certainly something to watch out for, especially on how they are going to counter it. It’s gets boring to say it…but educating the users is the solution – not more technological strangleholds.

Source: The Register