After hard disk, viruses now target dignity
*Malware Takes Over Networking Accounts And Sends Out Embarrassing Messages To Friends * Brad Stone San Francisco: It used to be that computer viruses attacked only your hard drive. Now they attack your dignity. Malicious programs are rampaging through websites like Facebook and Twitter, spreading themselves by taking over people’s accounts and sending out messages to all of their friends and followers. The result is that people are inadvertently telling their co-workers and loved ones how to raise their IQs or make money instantly, or urging them to watch an awesome new video in which they star. “I wonder what people are thinking of me right now?” said Matt Marquess, an employee at a public relations firm in San Francisco whose Twitter account was recently hijacked, showering his followers with messages that appeared to offer a $500 gift card to Victoria’s Secret. Marquess was clueless about the offers until a professional acquaintance asked him about them via email. Confused, he logged in to his account and noticed he had been promoting lingerie for five days. “No one had said anything to me,” he said. “I thought, how long have I been Twittering about underwear?” The humiliation sown by these attacks is just collateral damage. In most cases, the perpetrators are hoping to profit from the referral fees they get for directing people to sketchy ecommerce sites. In other words, even the crooks are on social networks now — because millions of tightly connected potential victims are just waiting for them there. Often the victims lose control of their accounts after clicking on a link “sent” by a friend. In other cases, the bad guys apparently scan for accounts with easily guessable passwords. After discovering their accounts have been seized, victims renounce the unauthorized messages publicly, apologizing for inadvertently bombarding their friends. These messages — one might call them Tweets of shame — convey a distinct mix of guilt, regret and embarrassment. “I have been hacked; taking evasive maneuvers. Much apology, my friends,” wrote Rocky Barbanica, a producer for Rackspace Hosting, an internet storage firm, in one such note. Earlier malicious programs could also cause a similar embarrassment if they spread themselves through a person’s email address book. But those messages, traveling from computer to computer, were more likely to be stopped by antivirus or firewall software. On the web, such measures offer little protection. A worm that spread around *Facebook* recently featured a photo of a sparsely dressed woman and offered a link to “see more”. Adi Av, a computer developer in Israel, encountered the image on the Facebook page of a friend he considered to be a reliable source of amusing internet content. A couple of clicks later, the image was posted on Av’s Facebook profile and sent to the “news feed” of his 350 friends. NYT NEWS SERVICE
