Who would want to do anything nasty like let loose a virus in a friendly place like a social network? Going by reports, this seems to be catching on. Trojan Grups is a piece of malware, recently discovered, and it is the first ever to work out of a newsgroup. Google Groups has never had an attack like this before. A distinguishing quality of this attack is that the Trojan involved takes control of Google’s very servers, not just their social networking script, and turns them into malware-spewing Botnets themselves.
This seems to be the wave of the future: using major server systems to be repurposed into malware machines. Twitter recently had major trouble in this way too. Hackers in these attacks try to pass off malware programming code as tweets. This might actually be the way viruses are spread in the future; they are notoriously difficult to get rid of too: Google still hasn’t found a way around it. Should this happen to a small Facebook clone site, how would they respond?
