We are pleased to welcome MySpace as a StopBadware Sponsor!

StopBadware Sponsors are organizations that support StopBadware’s work through generous financial contributions and/or in-kind donations. When we accept donations from sponsors, we ask them to pledge their commitment to protecting users’ choice regarding how their computers and network connections may be used.

We hope that this sponsorship will be the start of a productive relationship in which MySpace and StopBadware work together to make the Internet safer for all of us.

Think a friend’s latest post on your Facebook wall is a little odd? Trust your instincts. Social engineering scams are on the rise.

The latest round of attacks on Facebook include messages and comments on users’ walls that appear to come from friends. The fake messages include seemingly irresistible bait – a claim that a video of you in a compromising position has been posted is one of the currently popular lures. If you follow the link in the message, the page you’re taken to could infect your computer with "drive-by" malware that can download without your permission. In other cases, the page might claim that you need to download an additional plug-in to view the video. You guessed it: that plug-in turns out to be malware.

It’s hard to protect yourself against this kind of attack, when our assumption is that messages from our friends are trustworthy. But think back to the early days of email viruses. Remember being warned not to open an unexpected attachment, even from a friend, without checking that your friend really sent it? If you receive a message that just seems odd – maybe it doesn’t sound like your friend’s normal writing style, or your friend isn’t usually the type to be snapping videos at drunken parties – check it out with the friend before clicking the link. If their account has been compromised, you’ll be protecting your friend and their entire network, as well as yourself, by letting them know there’s a problem.

Want to read up on the latest social network scams? Kaspersky Lab has a post about the current Koobface worm on Facebook and Myspace, and Trend Micro blogs about a similar social engineering trick targeting users of MSN Live Messenger.

MySpace users, look out for a new brand of website hacking technique that’s emerged over the past week. The hack inserts code that loads a background image linking back to a badware site, and has so far had several prominent victims, most notably pop star Alicia Keyes.

A user who clicks anywhere on the site that is not a legitimate, pre-existing link will be redirected by the linked background image to the badware site, apparently hosted in China. The user will also be prompted to download a codec to view videos – something one might expect on a MySpace page – which itself delivers malware.

The attacks were first noted last week by researchers at FaceTime Communications, and have gained widespread coverage this week due to the hacking of Keyes’s page.

While MySpace reacted quickly to reports of the hacks, there is also word that Keyes’s page, at least, has been reinfected once. There’s no estimate yet on how many users may have been infected, or how many MySpace pages have been compromised, but one thing seems certain: this is a technique to watch out for in the future, on MySpace, and beyond.