Computer Spot

The viruses and malware are practically everywhere these days. A recent virus outbreak on Facebook came in the form of an app.

It was an astoundingly clever one too. The app, disturbingly called If I Die, worked in a rather curious way. You were supposed to take a video for after your death.

The video was supposed to be played by someone you loved after you died. The app’s advertising slogan – “Death can catch you anywhere, anytime. Leave your If I Die message before it’s too late”. Well, how overwhelmingly silly.

But if you did find it oddly sweet somehow and you downloaded it, that’s when it hit you. It really did – it was a virus and not really an app that all.

It went and stole passwords and tried to steal from you. It did other things too – stole your photos, took pictures with your WebCam and spied on you.

It was one nasty piece of work. So what kind of method you use for Facebook virus removal? Usually, Facebook virus removal doesn’t need anything other than your traditional antivirus.

Unfortunately, that isn’t the only Facebook virus out there. Far from it, it’s only one of the latest ones to actually get any publicity. A while ago, Koobface was the Facebook virus that everyone wanted to talk about (yes, it’s Facebook spelled backwards).

In some instances as with KoobFace, Facebook virus removal can be done without actually turning to an antivirus software package.

While it can be done, it shouldn’t be the way you choose unless you don’t have antivirus (why you don’t have antivirus is anyone’s guess as there are plenty of great free choices out there).

Actually, KoobFace has been designed to thwart any attempts at manual removal. Manual removal requires that you be familiar with editing the registry. You’ll be able to find detailed instructions to do with deleting various registry entries all over the web.

With less nefarious Facebook viruses, removal tends to be slightly easier. For instance, with some Facebook viruses, all you need to do is to deny access to it and delete it from your account.

Doing that is pretty easy. You just need to go to the Account tab on your Facebook account, click on Privacy Settings, and then choose Edit your Setting for Apps, Games and Websites. At that point, it’s easy to remove the virus and deny access.

Prevention would be far better than attempting desperate cures like this, of course. Make sure that you don’t use Facebook apps and quizzes for no reason, and you should go a long way towards securing your account.

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Ever wondered about who thought of the term “con artist” to describe someone who is obviously just a thief? Well, they also call them social engineers.

It’s for reason of course – it’s quite an art how they use their understanding of human nature to manipulate people and get them to do exactly as they wish.

This kind of social engineering in pursuit of fraud is particularly useful in the era of social networking. It helps hackers really get a Facebook virus in and about.

A very popular thing for makers of Facebook virus and malware examples to do to spread their evil, often, is to hack into a person’s account, gain control of it, and then to chat over Facebook to his closest friends with some dishonest plan in mind.

They think of some kind of sob story about how they are far from home, have been robbed and need some money. The person who receives this message will believe that since it comes from his friend’s Facebook account, it has to be genuine.

Here’s the perfect example for why they call this “social engineering”. Facebook has thousands and thousands of Facebook applications. They are made for all kinds of interests. People download them to add to the fun of it all.

Facebook doesn’t scrutinize or approve most of those apps that are on offer. Facebook’s app list is more like the Google Apps Marketplace than like the iTunes App Store in this way.

So when you download and install a Facebook app, you have no idea what it is – it could be a Facebook virus, for all you know. In many cases, it actually is.

And even if you don’t download an actual Facebook virus posing as an app, you could be downloading something programmed by some school kid who won’t be careful with the access he has to your personal information. You can get robbed that way.

What do you do when you find an app that says something irresistible like, “Find out about which of your friends is about to break up in the next 20 min”? Can you really resist? That’s social engineering for you.

There are many more tricks they have up their sleeve. For instance, how about a message you might get that says, “Here’s a great new video about you”.

Who could resist this?  Even if you receive this from a friend, there is no way you could know if your friend really sent this – or if a hacker gained access to your friend’s account. Almost always, this is a virus.

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There is a virus that is aimed at the social networks-Facebook in particular, that is sweeping through the computers of the people who use the social networks. This very dangerous virus can be hard to remove and can cause a great deal of damage to your computer.

Koobface is a worm, and is not actually a new problem. It has been around for some time, but is becoming increasingly prevalent because of the number of people who now use the social networking sites.

Infection is via a link on the profile of one of your friends-or it might be sent to you via private message or be posted on your profile. Because the link is from a friend, and this encourages trust, and leads to many people clicking the link. A video then plays which contains the Koobface worm hidden within, which silently installs itself onto your computer without telling you.

It then searches your cookies on your computer. These are small files that contain your login information and other visit information to many sites. Read the rest of this entry →

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If you spend a large amount of your time traveling, then you may consider staying connected to family and friends a problem. When your traveling is restricted to just your home country this is less of a problem, but how can you stay in touch when over seas?

For local travelers, who are away from home a lot but always in their own country, a smartphone may be the perfect solution. Not only do cell phone plans now come with a large amount of talk time for a very small cost, they often have data plans too.

This means that the owner can use social network websites such as Facebook or Twitter to keep in touch with people, but also can email whenever they choose to. Photos can be shared through social networking sites or through dedicated image sharing sites, allowing the traveler to not only let people know what they are doing but also let them see how their family are doing.

Text messaging (SMS) services can provide a cheap way of chatting with family, and these will sometimes operate locally, nationally and internationally too. The costs would vary depending upon how far the message has to travel, and how many networks it has to cross, and may be fairly considerable. Read the rest of this entry →

Be prepared, Apple and T-Mobile, for Palm is trying to gatecrash the smartphone market segment party, so firmly dominated firstly by iPhone and then T-Mobile G1 in the year 2008.

Its weapons? The touchscreen Pre and a brand-new platform with has the name WebOS.

Allow us to postpone the rest of the article by stating that we seriously think there has been some serious mix-up in the naming of the new OS of smartphones nowadays.

I mean, shouldn’t Google’s OS be named WebOS while Palm’s be named Android? That would be cool, wouldn’t it?

Back to our story, Pre. It has a large 3.1-inch 480×320 touch screen complete with multitouch and accelerometer support.

The gadget weighs 4.8 ounces, has a slide-out curved keypad. As the name of the platform suggests, it also integrates the now compulsory Wi-Fi and 3G features. Read the rest of this entry →