Facebook users warned vs. zipped 'scandal' photos

Users of social networking site Facebook were warned over the weekend against a new malware campaign pretending to be an email about a supposed revealing photo of the recipient.

 

Sophos said the emails have a variety of subject lines and message bodies, and arrive with an attached ZIP file (IMG0893.zip) which contains a Trojan horse.

 

"(Our antivirus) products protect users against the threat, detecting it as Troj/Bredo-VV and Mal/BredoZp-B. The Bredo Trojan is nothing new, and we regularly see variants of it spammed out widely across the internet using a variety of social engineering lures to trick users into opening the dangerous attachment," it said.

 

But it warned the subject lines used in the campaign may whet the recipient's curiosity or worry, and prompt him or her to open the email.

 

It said samples of the subject lines in the new malware campaign include:

 

- RE:Check the attachment you have to react somehow to this picture

- RE:You HAVE to check this photo in attachment man

- RE:They killed your privacy man your photo is all over facebook! NAKED!

- RE:Why did you put this photo online?

 

The message bodies contained inside the email can also vary, it said.

 

"You can imagine how some people would react if they received a message like this in their email. Many might open the attachment out of curiosity (or even with trepidation that a private photo had leaked onto the internet!) and end up having their Windows computer infected as a result," Sophos said.

 

It advised Facebook users to "keep your wits about you, and your anti-virus up-to-date." — ELR, GMA News