I don’t know what kind of weirdos are looking at porn on Facebook, but there’s at least 110,000 of them: That’s how many people fell victim to an especially embarrassing piece of malware over just two days of monitoring by virus researchers at Full Disclosure.
In a brief report for the site, Mohammad R. Faghani explains how the nefarious bit of programming works:
The trojan tags the infected user’s friends in an enticing post. Upon opening the post, the user will get a preview of a porn video which eventually stops and asks for downloading a (fake) flash player to continue the preview. The fake flash player is the downloader of the actual malware.
That malware uses a new technique that Faghani calls “Magnet,” which entails sharing the porn video by tagging a user’s friends—including parents, employers, and significant others. These X-rated wall posts, Faghani notes, “may be seen by friends of the victim’s friends as well, which leads to a larger number of potential victims.” Because it only tags 20 people each time, the malware has stayed under the radar despite its rampant spread since late January.
The silver lining, it would seem, is that even some moms are taking the bait.
MY MOM WAS ON FACEBOOK AND CLICKED ON A VIRUS THAT HAD A THUMBNAIL OF A DOG FUCKING A GIRL AND ITS ALL OVER HER PAGE IM LAUGHING SO HARD
— cass (@cassfx13) February 10, 2015
Anyway, take heed, and maybe tab over to Pornhub if you need to watch something dirty?
H/T Metro | Photo via Alan Levine/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)