Facebook Error/Outage

You may already be aware of the Facebook worm that is spreading through Facebook for weeks now. As a result, Facebook are resetting some user passwords and scrubbing the service for the malicious links to eradicate the worm.

So if you are unable to use Facebook right now this is the most likely cause.

Heres what Craig Schmugar, a threat researcher at McAfee Inc. had to say on the matter:

"We're not seeing increases in propagation," he acknowledged today, but noted that cleanup was a tough chore for Facebook. "It's a bit of a cat-and-mouse game for them," he said. "There are certainly millions of links on Facebook. How do you know which are the bad ones, which are the good ones? That's not without problems."

Wednesday, Schmugar was one of the first security researchers to notice Koobface's spread and notify Facebook.

Earlier in the week, Facebook users began reporting receiving spam messages such as "You look just awesome in this new movie" or "You look so amazing funny on our new video" that tried to dupe them into clicking on a link. Schmugar said that if they did, they were taken to one of several compromised sites that then displayed a fake error message claiming that Adobe System Inc.'s Flash was out of date, and prompted them to download an update.

The "update" was nothing of the kind, but instead was an executable file that installed the Koobface worm, which in turn installed a background proxy server that redirected all Web traffic. According to Schmugar, the proxy servers listens on TCP port 9090, particularly for search requests to the major search engines, including Google, Yahoo and Microsoft's Live Search.

Today, Facebook said it was dealing with the worm. "We're working quickly to update our security systems to minimize any further impact, including resetting passwords on infected accounts, removing the spam messages and coordinating with third parties to remove redirects to malicious content elsewhere on the Web," said spokesman Barry Schnitt in an e-mail.

Users are advised not to click unfamiliar links and delete them straight away.

See the post: Facebook Virus for more