Ramnit Worm Filches Credentials of 45,000 Facebook Accountholders

According to Seculert, one PC-worm called Ramnit, created for filching straight from financial institutions and bank accountholders, through treacherously capturing Internet bank logins, is widely circulating across Facebook as it's been garnering passwords and e-mail ids of 45,000 members.

Reportedly, about 4% of detected contaminations from Ramnit have been traced to Internet-users beyond the French and American geographies.

The Ramnit, customized for Facebook, demonstrates a malware's evolution from electronic mail to social-networks wherein it can proliferate fast through the delivery of corrupted web-links to owners of compromised accounts, with the majority of such account-owners assuming the web-links to be more secured compared to e-mail attachments, as they haven't been dispatched from strangers.

The Security Company states that the attacker's purpose is for logging into and compromising victims' accounts from where he can dispatch vicious web-links to their contacts. This way the worm self-proliferates enormously, similar in what Symantec Corp. lately reported of Ramnit variants as accountable for 17.3% of the total contaminations worldwide.

Moreover, during September-December-end 2011, the worm contaminated 800,000 computers as it targeted financial institutions, corporate networks and online-banking sessions.

Understandably, cyber-criminals at present are attacking Facebook accounts more for disseminating their malware campaigns amongst numerous customers of social networks.

Vice-President of Security Research, Michael Sutton of Zscaler Threat Labs stated that the shift onto social-networking websites showed how end-users fundamentally changed in their communication style with others. V3.co.uk published this on January 6, 2012.

Furthermore, researchers state that although Ramnit is spreading in a novel way, its ultimate goal is unchanged i.e. to hijack accounts of Facebook and utilize them for furthering cyber-fraudsters' activities.

According to Seculert, cyber-miscreants don't just find it easier for proliferating viruses by contaminating accounts on Facebook, Google mail alternatively, other social network or cloud platform, but, it as well exposes corporate networks of even more sensitive nature through the numerous connections employees maintain through websites for social networking.

Conclusively, according to researchers, Facebook very well knows about the latest trend; however, faces constraints in checking the related assaults, while web-intruders try worms on social networks as an increasingly affective mode of attack compared with traditional e-mail viruses.

Related article: Remote Workers Not Concerned About Security Threats

» SPAMfighter News - 1/14/2012