Yesterday I received a notice that I had a message from a friend on Facebook. I logged in, went to my inbox, checked the message, and found a link supposedly having something to do with a video that I’d be embarrased about. The link, I noticed, went to geocities, and featured a video player from “yuotube.” What threw up the biggest red flag was that it said I needed to download the latest Flash plugin and attempted to start the download automatically. Of course, I was already on guard and carefully looking into this and didn’t procede. It turns out that it was the “Koobface” virus.

The virus is contained in the “flash_player.exe” file that it attempts to download. Apparently the virus will turn your computer into a zombie machine that’s part of a botnet.

The first thing I’m doing when I get home is alerting my friend about this. It’s not only affecting Facebook users, but also members of MySpace. Instructions for removing the virus can be found here.