Facebook and cyber social networking sites generally are ever becoming more popular as a way of staying in touch with what your friends are doing, arranging evenings out, and generally chatting, but be warned, here too the ominous computer virus can strike!
Ankit Fadia a renowned ethical hacker and cyber expert has recently warned that with just one wrong click within Facebook, you could be downloading a virus to your computer, instead of looking at someone’s photos, a funny message or something else equally innocuous.
The latest trend of infiltrating computers, it seems, will now be through Facebook. It would also appear that this method began a few months ago, and has been on the increase ever since. This of course in turn means that the number of people whose systems are infected this way is likely to rise.
With one single click, all your contacts will receive a message from your facebook account, your system is infected, and the virus is on its way elsewhere. It all starts with an anonymous e-mail through the Facebook system. If this mail is clicked on, in any Facebook account, a pop up box appears asking permission to download with the options ‘yes’ and ‘no’. If the person clicks yes to this, then all the friends that they have listed on their account will receive the same message while at the same time, the download takes place.
Although this basic passing on of a message like this might seem harmless enough, what it does, is to allow the virus to infiltrate your computer and that of any one or more of your contacts who also click ‘yes’. The download is a trojan virus, and, once a trojan is installed in the computer, the access way is open for cyber criminals to get in there, access your system and hack your passwords, banking, personal details and anything else that you do on your computer.
Older methods of getting viruses onto computers via spam e-mails are still out there, and still need to be watched for, but with social networking becoming more popular with people, the cyber criminals are following suit and utilising this nice easy method of infiltrating computers.
There is a very simple way to avoid getting a virus through Facebook however. So what is this simple solution? Never ever click on the ‘yes’ button to download anything, and never click on any other anonymous messages either. The virus cannot transfer from one system to another without a point of access, and it is the mistake of clicking ‘yes’ which gives it this point of access.
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