Crooks Continue Social Media Assault

There’s been a disturbing trend over the past few weeks showing that cyber-criminals are getting more adept at using popular social sites to ambush unsuspecting users. We’ve seen attacks targeted at Twitter, Facebook, Google’s Gmail, Gtalk, and even search. Today’s spotlight is on YouTube, a big part of the reason PandaLabs has seen a 400 percent spike in the infection rate of a specific kind of adware.

Crooks appear to be adopting the youngster’s mantra that email is for old people, and are targeting social networking sites where people gather en masse, and where the novelty and ease of communication makes them more trusting. 

It could be a mindset thing, a stage in Internet development. Collectively users trusted any old thing that galloped into their email inboxes at one time. A decade later most of us know better and spam filters are much more effective.

PandaLabs sounded the alarm a couple of weeks ago about comment spam popping up via hacked accounts on Digg. Following links that promised Christian Bale “freak out” hilarity and Jessica Simpson/Megan Fox sex tapes led users from the social news site straight to a codec download. The codec of course carried only VideoPlay, a form of adware.

To add insult to injury, the program offered a supposed security solution users could pay to download and get rid of the adware just placed on their systems.

The same technique is being used on YouTube. Complete with in-video prompt “CLICK HERE FORN PORN ==>,” the