Thousands of Facebook accounts may have been comprised by the Ramnit worm, a security firm has revealed.
A computer worm called Ramnit has been used to compromise approximately 45,000 Facebook accounts, most of them in Europe and the UK, a security firm reported this week. According to Seculert, the Ramnit worm, which has been described as "a multi-component malware family which infects Windows executable as well as HTML files," is now targeting social media sites such as Facebook.
Ramnit had previously been linked to attacks on the financial industries, notes PC Mag.
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More from the Seculert team:
We suspect that the attackers behind Ramnit are using the stolen credentials to log-in to victims' Facebook accounts and to transmit malicious links to their friends, thereby magnifying the malware's spread even further. In addition, cybercriminals are taking advantage of the fact that users tend to use the same password in various web-based services (Facebook, Gmail, Corporate SSL VPN, Outlook Web Access, etc.) to gain remote access to corporate networks.