I got the impression that lately the amount of phishing attacks via social media was not as great as we have seen in the past. But just as I logged in to Twitter today I noticed that I had received two direct messages, and they both had a very similar message.

Two days ago I received the first message, and when I tried to verify if it was a link spreading malware, or a phishing site, the URL was already inactive. Now when I received another one I wanted to look at it quickly, and at the time of writing the phishing site is still active.

It seems I’m not doing anything other than write about malware on Facebook, but here goes again. As you have probably read or seen yourself on Facebook, there are quite a few applications pretending to show you a list of people who have viewed your profile. I think the most common one is the “Stalker Application”.

Today I saw something that I haven’t seen before – the applications have changed tactics and have now been localized, meaning the page and message which is distributed is in different languages. In my case the language is Swedish, since I’m from Sweden, and I presume that the worms are also localized in other languages.

As with the other cases we have seen, the user is tricked into executing a JavaScript in their browser; that script then loads another script from another domain. The bad guys use this setup to make it harder for antivirus companies to block these domains. This particular case is pretty funny – because of a poorly configured web server we managed to get a complete list of all the domains used in this scam, and they have now been sent to our analysts so they can be blacklisted.

Continuing our investigation on the Osama's death campaign, we were especially concerned about the potential distribution of malware on social networks, because of their speed of propagation. So we have been monitoring Twitter, getting some million tweets and a huge number of URLs too. No surprise here as during the last 24 hours the average was 4.000 tweets per second related to this topic. Here you can see how even Internet traffic was affected.

Analyzing these URLs, we found some interesting stuff.

The first one is a Facebook scam campaign posing as Osama's death video: