Facebook

Facebook started rolling out a new home page and navigation menus earlier today. And whenever Facebook adds new features, in this case the Applications and Games dashboards, there’s usually a new privacy setting as well. This is what part of the new Applications dashboard looks like. All Facebook has raised some privacy concerns regarding the dashboard’s output. Do you really want all of your “friends” to know what applications you’ve been running? ...

With virus and spam outbreaks, analysts needs to keep their nerves to analyze the situation and proceed to deal with the new threat. So, I wasn’t expected to be surprised by my friends’ actions on facebook this past weekend. It started innocently enough, as a post about getting a Free $25 Starbucks gift card for joining a particular group. The first person to join the group from my friends list happens to work for a non-profit organization helping young people. So, I expected the young people on his “friends list” to join this group shortly. ...

(CNN) — This week, 100 charities are battling for votes on Facebook to win $1 million. The competition is a new approach to philanthropic giving and is led by JPMorgan Chase, which throughout the competition will donate a total of $5 million to 100 charities chosen by Facebook users. Traditionally, organizations would go through a grant process, and Chase would choose who would get its money and how much. However, late last year, Chase decided to take a different approach and put the power of choosing charities into the hands of Americans. Chase took a database filled with 500,000 nonprofit organizations and uploaded the information on to Facebook. The bank then allowed “crowdsourcing” to choose which charities should be recognized. The top 100 charities won $25,000 and advanced to the second round, where another vote will determine which organization will win $1 million. The five runners-up in the second round will receive $100,000 each. Another $1 million will be given to a single charity chosen from the original group by a Chase board of directors set up to oversee this competition. The concept of crowdsourcing corporate giving via online communities and voting was first used by American Express in 2007. In the Members Project, American Express would donate $5 million to charities submitted and selected by card members. But Chase has taken a huge leap by moving the entire competition to Facebook. “We wanted to find a way where we could hear from the communities we were operating in and hear what was important to them,” said Chase Community Giving foundation President Kim Davis. The philanthropic arm of the large bank donates annually $100 million to organizations around the world, Davis said. “This, for us, is very much about testing out a new way of doing corporate philanthropy for the firm.” More than a million fans have participated in the Facebook program. Along the way, obscure charities have joined better-known ones near the top of the rankings. Because the winners of the first round worked hard to organize their online communities, smaller charities with get-out-the-vote passion were able to compete with larger organizations. Thus, the final 100 charities range from the large Susan G. Komen for the Cure (which claims on its Web site to be the “world’s largest grassroots network of breast cancer survivors and activists”) to the Feel Your Boobies foundation, started by a woman in her garage, who wants to increase awareness of breast cancer screenings in young women. As of midday Thursday, the top vote-getting charity on the contest’s Facebook page was Invisible Children Inc., a nonprofit that seeks to combat child-related violence in Africa through documentary storytelling. Other companies are starting to pick up on crowdsourcing corporate philanthropy. ...

Facebook recently rolled out new privacy settings that provides additional publishing controls. For example, Facebook users can now publish a photo to a selected list of friends. Clicking the “lock” icon opens the Custom Privacy settings. Once a photo is selected and the privacy options are set, the next step is to Share. As you can see, the default setting is set for Only Friends and this particular post is set for Only Me. ...

Researchers at McAfee labs monitor Koobface activities 24/7 via custom honeypots and while reviewing one such update we noticed a variant that had debug/log features. Unlike the traditional captcha breaking technique to create new accounts, this variant of the worm converts the infected machine to a bot. When we analysed the malware trapped in our botnet, we found that this variant of Koobface has a special feature for logging all activities carried out during the infection process in a log file . Log file is created under system root with date and time stamp for eg, C:\fb_reg20090612.log. ...

Koobface is still going strong despite not making the headlines so much anymore. Well, the Koobface gang took the time to send a Christmas card and wish security researchers a happy new year. Very nice of them… For a couple of days now I’ve been looking at their infection method and trying to see any interesting patterns. The bad guys use bogus blogpost.com blog pages to redirect users to the actual Koobface malware. The redirection consists of several attempts to connect to compromised PCs, through their IP address. Below is a Fiddler log showing those attempted connections (in red are failed connections). Once a host has successfully responded, the users are redirected to a fake page prompting them to install a video codec. ...

Activities associated with Koobface have increased during the month of December. Often it is for the sending of traffic to compromised servers in order to obtain more servers. Other times the activity centers around using those same compromised servers to proxy users to malicious domains that are then used for further distribution of malware or command and control of the infected machines. I noticed a trend with some of the domain-based locations making use of the holiday theme. This has included everything from “presents for your pets” to “festive holiday trees” – these are domains that appear legitimate but are not. In fact, many of the domains that are being used were legitimate at one point and now are serving a different, more questionable purpose. ...

Hopefully, the holiday season has found you spending a good amount of time offline: enjoying moments spent with friends and family, keeping long-standing traditions or creating new ones to follow for seasons to come, or just relaxing due to some downtime from work or school. It wouldn’t come as much of a surprise, though, if you’ve still found yourself spending a fair share of your time during the holidays online: checking status updates and posting new pictures on Facebook, or sending and checking tweets on Twitter. And, why not? These networking sites are an easy way to connect and share with the people we care about. ...

Security researchers examining the directories of the URLs of some of the latest Koobface runs may stumble upon a Christmas greeting:

I was just looking at Facebook to check for spam and scams when I found this: I’ve blurred out a few things for privacy, and, most crucially, safety. The point of this post is the domain name. The spaces around the dot and the zero in “C0M” are just as they were in the original spam message. If spammers are going to the trouble to obfuscate their messages, it seems to show that Facebook’s spam filters are having some effect. Malformed links mean that you have to make an serious effort to actually go and visit the spammer site. And consequently, if someone’s going to go through all that trouble, they’re more likely to buy into whatever scam is at the other end. Click on the link, and you immediately get redirected, even though you won’t notice: ...

I ran into a few strange IMs over the weekend. When I was not shoveling out my driveway from the 15 inches of snow that covered it I was logged into Facebook telling people about it…. It was then that I started receiving some VERY interesting IMs from a friend extolling the virtues of a clean colon (yep – you read that right): This lead to the following questionable site, which had some very interesting comments on McAfee SiteAdvisor site: ...

Following on from the latest Captcha techniques used by the W32/Koobface worm, it seems that the malware authors have turned to Santa for help to deliver it’s nasty surprise which awaits Facebook users. The infection drops other trojans such as FakeAlert and leaves the user renderless. It all begins with a post on a user’s Facebook Wall. If the user clicks on the link, they are presented with a fake video player with a Christmas greeting as shown below ...

There were two news stories recently that seemed to coincide. In the first, Cisco issued an annual security report which said the two current targets of the Internet criminal underground are banks and social networks. Banks because, well, we all know what they keep there. Social networks are targets because that’s where weakly protected password databases are kept and the passwords they contain probably are used on a lot of other sites as well. ...