AVG Protects Against Massive Rogue Attack on Facebook
Over the weekend hugely popular social networking site Facebook was hit by a massive rogue attack announced AVG Technologies, company that specializes in providing antivirus and internet security protection to home and business users. According to AVG, from midnight to 9 am EST on Saturday, May 15 more than 300,000 rogue applications were detected and blocked by the company’s security software solutions.
“This latest issue really underscores how powerful, while at the same time vulnerable, social networking applications are. This attack was actually stunning in terms of scale,” said Roger Thompson, AVG’s Chief Research Officer. “Facebook is very responsive to threats when we identify them, and removing these applications as soon as they find them, but they’re still able to generate huge traffic, just because of the viral nature of social networks. It is staggering how many threats were propagated before they were stopped.”
There were two rogues that made the rounds online last week. First there was an adware-supported viewer that used an image of a girl in bikini to lure unsuspecting users to install the application. By 9 am EST, AVG’s servers had detected more than 200,000 of this particular threat – which AVG says was not viral. Secondly there was a rogue antispyware application that – AVG detected about 24,000 of this threat.
By Friday, it seemed that the rogue attack dwindled to just a couple hundred per day, indicating that it would be over soon. But that did not happen. On Saturday AVG detected a massive rogue push.
“Interestingly, they launched it on a Saturday. I guess they figure we don’t watch on the weekend, but malcode researchers are all cut from the same cloth as Inspector Gadget… we’re always on duty,” added Thompson
To stay safe and protected online, you need to use a properly good antivirus application. If you do not have an antivirus application and would like to get one for free, you could get AVG Free here. It provides basic protection against viruses and spyware.
“This latest issue really underscores how powerful, while at the same time vulnerable, social networking applications are. This attack was actually stunning in terms of scale,” said Roger Thompson, AVG’s Chief Research Officer. “Facebook is very responsive to threats when we identify them, and removing these applications as soon as they find them, but they’re still able to generate huge traffic, just because of the viral nature of social networks. It is staggering how many threats were propagated before they were stopped.”
There were two rogues that made the rounds online last week. First there was an adware-supported viewer that used an image of a girl in bikini to lure unsuspecting users to install the application. By 9 am EST, AVG’s servers had detected more than 200,000 of this particular threat – which AVG says was not viral. Secondly there was a rogue antispyware application that – AVG detected about 24,000 of this threat.
By Friday, it seemed that the rogue attack dwindled to just a couple hundred per day, indicating that it would be over soon. But that did not happen. On Saturday AVG detected a massive rogue push.
“Interestingly, they launched it on a Saturday. I guess they figure we don’t watch on the weekend, but malcode researchers are all cut from the same cloth as Inspector Gadget… we’re always on duty,” added Thompson
To stay safe and protected online, you need to use a properly good antivirus application. If you do not have an antivirus application and would like to get one for free, you could get AVG Free here. It provides basic protection against viruses and spyware.
