According to some security analysts, suspicious direct messages from Twitter friends with links to Facebook that have started to make their rounds might not be all that simple, especially when there is the very real possibility of them being malicious “backdoor trojans.” Have you been receiving direct messages on Twitter that resembled spam? Those Facebook links in there tend to be bogus most of the time, and Sophos analyst Graham Cluley wrote about it, sharing with the rest of the world the different variations of the direct messages that include, “your in this [link] lol” and “lol ur famous now [link]”.
Folks who were curious enough to click on this link were sent over to a video player which mentions, “An update to Youtube player is needed.” Following the instructions that follow would see one asked to download “FlashPlayerV10.1.57.108.exe,” which Sophos antivirus products detect it as Troj/Mdrop-EML – a kind of backdoor Trojan which is capable of copying itself to accessible drives and network shares. No idea on whether other antivirus programs will detect it as such though. Now that it is 2012 already, hopefully there will be Internet veterans who stop acting as though this is the first time they are online.
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