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Friendster Comment Spam

I’ve been itching to write about this Friendster comment spam since the start of the year. Actually the post date of this article is January 7th, 2009 but enough of that. Back to the main story:

Do you have a friendster account?

Does the phrase “My webcam is finally working, and I want you to come see me!” sounds familiar?

Do you recognize the picture below in one of comments your friends sent you? Sorry I need to edit the image since the original one is showing some skin 🙂

friendster-spam-comment-pron

Warning: Do not click it!

I would like to inform you that you (and your friends) have been hit by a comment spam 🙂

I received the same Friendster comments from siblings, cousins and friends during the holidays. I notified them via instant messaging and email that they are sending me comment that seems to be related to virus and/or p0rn. I told them to delete the comment manually (since we both know we do not like pron in our profiles 🙂 ). Most of them replied that they did not send me that comment and they are clueless on why did it happen. I told them that their PC that they use to open Friendster might be infected with this and that virus and then we went with our holiday greetings, catch-up chats and forgot about the spam comment issue.

This weekend as I was browsing my Friendster profile and I noticed that some of my friends still have that same comment spam active in their profiles. It’s been 3 weeks and this spam is still around so I got curious. I did a quick research (using the html files I got before and the new ones I grabbed from their friendster profiles). But my tinkering yields a little info: The image used in the comment is hosted in imageshack and the links point to several sites with URL strings related to “free“, “camera“, “cam“, and “grooving“. The links are then redirected to a social networking site (popular for their video and image sharing). You have to register to the social networking site to view those videos and images. Something is fishy here. This link trail is similar to some  pron scheme sites that I know of. And given the limited info I have now, I will leave this case open and will update this post in the future.

On how to clean up this mess? I suggest the following:

1. Delete the comment spam.

2. Set your Friendster profile with stricter settings. Accept comments from friends only and do not automatically approve comments, do it the manual way.

If you want a step by step instructions, I found this useful How to stop Friendster Spam article.

Last note: Friendster is very popular in the Philippines (and in South East Asia too). It’s very accessible to our young people. Ask your kids, nieces and nephews and I know they will answer that they have friendster account too. Lets keep it clean, safe and free from p0rn.

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It’s Apple’s Turn: OSX_KROWI.A

My guess (posted in my last month’s Firefox malware post) proved to be true. This week is Apple and Mac‘s turn on the malware spotlight.

Trend Micro and Intego reported seeing a malicious file (read: trojan) packaged inside a cracked version of iWork 09, the productivity suite recently released by Apple. The cracked iWork 09 is being circulated via the popular peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing protocol Bittorrent. Upon installation of the cracked iWork 09 package, the malicious file (detected by Trend Micro as OSX_KROWI.A) is then automatically executed and can make the Macintosh machine compromised.

Interested to read the full techie details? Check out Trendlabs’ blog and Intego’s advisory.

I suggest that whenever you download any application software via P2P site, try to scan them first with your antivirus, anti-spyware and other security programs and check out for any suspicious files or detection. And remember that even Macs are not that safe nowadays.