Almost 400,000 members of Google’s social networking site, Orkut, were victimized by a new spam worm spreading around the site, said McAfee’s Avert Labs.
“While the worm doesn’t appear to harm users’ PCs, it does impact their profile and spread from friend to friend,” said McAfee. “This virus will add the user to a community called “Infectados pelo Virus Orkut” (“Infected by the Orkut Virus”) and starts to send messages to the friends of the infected user. Avert Labs believes Google is working to fight the worm.”
This raises concerns on how to keep the growing number of Web 2.0 sites safe and secure. MySpace and Facebook have faced similar issues recently, and everyone remembers the series of AIM Profile viruses and malicious code.
“I analyzed some suspicious scrap ‘2008 vem ai… que ele comece mto bem para vc’ from a bunch of friends on Orkut,” wrote McAfee’s Vinay Mahadik. “For a while it was all over Orkut!! Translated to English, it reads ‘2008 is coming…I wish that it begins quite well for you.'”
The worm is spreading through Orkut’s recently introduced tool that allows users to write messages that contain HTML code. The ability to add Flash/Javascript content to Orkut scraps was only recently introduced.
Click here for the full Avert Labs blog post.
The form has been named W32/KutWormer by McAfee.
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