This weekend, I got quite a kick out of the local radio annoucer doing her best to protect Edmonton listeners against the Koob worm that is moving through Facebook and is baiting users to install an update to their machines. While I think it was certainly an admirable thing for the announcer to do, I think it is telling as to how common Facebook and virus proctection has come in common parlance that this advice could be handed out over the radio and people would actually be able to understand it – or stand a chance to.
But where my part in this story comes in is that I tell all the Mac users that I’ve converted that you are safe (and attacks are dropping) from just about everything out there as long as you don’t install something that you are not sure about (unless you were paying attention the the hay that the press made last week about Apple’s KB update that was later pulled) – and this is exactly how Koob is moving, by getting people to install it, banking on the transfer of saftey from Facebook, creating a vector that might allow for Mac/Linux machines to be attacked.
Thankfully the Koob is probably dropping an exe file that won’t run, so we are safe for a while… So in addition to the “don’t install anything that you don’t understand”, I’ll add to my 1-2 saftey rant/appeal for common (computing?) sense – install updates only from the original vendor… if you are prompted to install something from Adobe, go to adobe.com and search for it – or google for the update that you are being prompted for to see if it is legit.
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