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Spammers, Virus Writers Abusing URL Shortening Services
- From: Brian Warkoczeski
- Date: Fri Jul 31 08:30:14 2009
Spammers, Virus Writers Abusing URL Shortening Services
www.washingtonpost.com
Purveyors of spam and malicious software are taking full advantage of
URL-shortening services like bit.ly and TinyURL in a bid to trick unwary
users into clicking on links to dodgy and dangerous Web sites.
Fortunately, with the help of a couple of tools and some common sense,
most Internet users can avoid these scams altogether.
According to alerts from anti-virus vendors McAfee, Symantec and Trend
Micro, the latest to abuse these services is the Koobface worm, which
targets users of social networking sites like Facebook (Koobface is an
anagram of Facebook) and Myspace. It's now also spreading via
microblogging service Twitter. Koobface arrives as a message that urges
users to click on a link to a video, which invariably leads to a site
that prompts the visitor to install a missing video plug-in. The fake
plug-in turns the user's system into a bot that can be used for a
variety of criminal purposes, from spamming to attacking other computers
and spreading the worm.
For rest of the article, see:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2009/07/spammers_virus_writers_abusing.html
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