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Washington - A new variant of a virus known as Koobface is making the rounds on the Facebook social network, a security software firm warned this week.
McAfee, in a company blog posting on Wednesday, said the virus, known as a worm, was being spread in the form of a message with a subject line along the lines of "You look just awesome in this new movie."
When users click on the message it informs them their Flash player is out of date. They are then prompted to download or open the file flash_player.exe, a new Koobface variant.
McAfee said Facebook, which has more than 120 million members, was purging the spammed links from their system "but with dozens of Koobface variants known to exist, the situation is likely to get worse before it gets better".
"The safe-computing practice created more than 10 years ago still applies today, which is not to open any unexpected email attachments, even if they are from someone you know," McAfee said.
McAfee said the motivation behind the virus appears to be to steal search results from a Facebook user's visits to such sites as Google, Yahoo, MSN and Live.com to enable fraud.
Internet news agency CNET quoted Facebook representative Barry Schnitt as saying the worm has been around since August although the variant seen this week is new.
"Only a very small percentage of Facebook users have been affected and we're working quickly to update our security systems to minimize any further impact," he said.
- AFP