Filtered By: Scitech
SciTech

Bin Laden still sowing terror in social networks


Even in death, Al-Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden is still spreading terror as cybercriminals recently pounced on public curiosity about his demise to infect computers via social networking sites. Kaspersky Lab malware researcher Vicente Diaz said in his blog that they have investigated and found potential distribution attempts of malware authors. One of those found was a fake video of Bin Laden’s death, which circulated mostly through Brazilian users’ social networks. The fake video spread initially through Twitter and the links go to a fake Facebook account. A second set of fake Bin Laden death videos was found in Twitter, this time, adding a .RAR file containing a malicious software. The same link was being distributed by the original Twitter source as a video for the latest action film “Fast Five." The attempt to infect is riding on major stories, in this case, the death of Bin Laden and an upcoming film. Another malware infection attempt that uses the Bin Laden death was a click-fraud campaign on Twitter that intended to redirect traffic to a site with publicity on it. The trend topic changes to keep the campaign under the radar while being propagated. The same links to the click-fraud campaigns are sent out as either Bin Laden death videos or as alleged banned videos of recording artists Justin Bieber and Bruno Mars. When a user clicks on the links, the destination page poses as a Youtube video. Instead of asking the victim to download a code upon clicking a button in the video, a new malicious tweet will be created in the victim´s own Twitter account, thus “replicating" itself. “The goal of the fraud is to redirect traffic to a page with publicity, earning the malware propagators some revenues by exploiting a trending topic," according to Diaz. Diaz advised the public to be very careful of links about such topics that seem suspicious and too obvious to be legitimate to avoid being scam victims. “Never follow links claiming to offer an exclusive footage or information about this particular topic, especially if the URLs are shortened or if they are not sure of the destination of the link. Also, never download anything like movies, compressed files, codecs for video to see a supposed online video, etcetera. Finally, do not trust any message which would likely be a spam," Diaz said. However, Diaz said that as the detected threats so far seem more Brazilian-centered and not highly sophisticated, it is not likely that any of them will suppose a global threat. Diaz said Kaspersky Lab has not detected any particular threat for the Philippines as of this writing. Although as top users of social networks, particularly Facebook and Twitter, the chances of being infected by this kind of threat is “higher in the Philippines than in other parts of the world, thus it might lead to a quick infection of the whole group." — Newsbytes.ph

LOADING CONTENT