Its rare to find a PC user who hasn’t suffered from a virus infection at one time or another. Although Windows is very resilient to viruses nowadays the growth of websites like Facebook have opened up a whole new bunch of threats, as some of the popular links can be hosts for various nasty pieces of software.
A story from Reuters today reports that virus infections from a gang of hackers operating on Facebook’s site have ceased, once the hackers were named. This from Reuters;
“Until the new disclosures, the Koobface gang had continued to target other social networks as a long-running FBI probe failed to result in arrests in Russia.
Koobface spread primarily through captured social networking accounts that prompted friends to install software to view a video. Initially content with small-scale advertising fraud, the group had also begun to distribute more pernicious software, including the Zeus trojans for bank-account theft, according to another researcher collaborating with Facebook, Gary Warner of the University of Alabama-Birmingham.”
Remember, when clicking links on sites like Facebook and Twitter, they are not necessarily safe. It isn’t a case of keeping your security software up to date, because all these links will ask you for permission when doing anything to your PC, and most people will give that permission and allow the attack to happen.