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Re: facebook worm

  • From: Gadi Evron
  • Date: Thu Aug 07 21:35:35 2008
[top-posting]

Now that this worm has been somewhat balked, I'd like to thank the membership for your patience with this off-topic post. I realize it is probably as annoying to some as it was useful to others.

My thinking was that on the rare occasion when we can anticipate *possible* and *serious* floods and bottle-necks at ISP tech-support lines, across multiple providers and regions, we should share that information. NANOG remains the best place for such information sharing.

While I realize this mailing list is mostly about network operations and less about ISP operations, we had a discussion in the past where we have seen some in our community do use this information effectively and find it useful.

This is a rare occasion indeed, but an explanation and an apology were in order.

Thank you,

Gadi.


On Wed, 6 Aug 2008, Gadi Evron wrote:
Hi all. You may want to be ready for a *possible* support lines flood today.

Yesterday I discovered a fast-spreading facebook worm. It spreads by sending messages to all your facebook friends, from your account, asking them to click on a link in the .pl ccTLD.

This worm is somewhat similar to zlob, here is a link to a kaspersky paper on a previous iteration of it, they call it koobface:
http://www.kaspersky.com/news?id=207575670

The worm collects spam subject lines from, and then sends the users personal data to the following C&C:
zzzping.com

I spoke with DirectNIC last night and the Registrar Operations (reg-ops) mailing list was updated that the domain is no longer reachable. That was very fast response time from DirectNIC, which we appreciate.

The worm is still fast-spreading, watch the statistics as they fly:
http://www.d9.pl/system/stats.php

The facebook security team is working on this, and they are quite capable. The security operations community has been doing analysis and take-downs, but the worm seems to still be spreading.

All anti virus vendors have been notified, and detection (if not removal) should be added within a few hours to a few days.

For now, while users may get infected, their information is safe (unless the worm has a secondary contact C&C which I have not verified yet).

It seems like some users may have learned not to click on links in email, but any other medium does not compute.

Gadi.