Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are great platforms for sharing all kinds of photos, including memes. However according to security researchers at Trend Micro (via TechCrunch), that meme you are laughing at on Twitter might not be so funny once hackers manage to activate malware on your computer without you knowing it.
Yup, it seems that hackers have managed to create a new kind of malware that does what most malware does, such as take screenshots of your activities, steals data, and sends it back to the hacker. It sounds almost boring, right? However what makes this new breed of malware interesting and dangerous is how it can be activated by code hidden within memes shared on Twitter.
This means that by looking at an image posted on Twitter, it will activate the malware and send commands to it, meaning that for all you know, the malware could be lying dormant on your computer, undetected, until you chance upon a meme in which the instructions are hidden and activates the malware to start taking screenshots of your computer.
That being said, not much is known about the malware for now, such as where it might have originated from, how it infects its victims to begin with, and what exactly it might be used for. However it is interesting to see how social media and something as innocuous as a meme could be used to trigger malware attacks.
Filed in . Read more about Hack, Malware, Security and Twitter.