New Research: Facebook and LinkedIn Users at a High Risk for Malware

Facebook and Linkedin users have a new thing to watch out for. New research suggests that users of these social medias are more likely to be victims of a certain ransomware that can potentially high jack computers.

A new ransomware named Locky is the culprit. It makes use of Facebook and Linkedin errors in order to infect computers. This is an interesting discovery since it was thought before that malware such as this can only penetrate devices through the use of OS and browser-based flaws.

Locky is said to affect users by tricking them to download images that are scripted with malicious codes. Once these images are downloaded and opened, it will get encrypted and users will have to pay up to fix the issue.

Facebook and Linkedin users are not left naked from the attack since experts admit that it will be easy to avoid Locky. The simplest and safest way would be to avoid opening any suspicious file.

On the other hand, experts are concerned regarding the delivery mechanism of such malware, given that most security apps are not very particular with big social networks, because of the idea that these websites have enough budget to deal with their own security issues. This makes people more susceptible since most users believe that Facebook is relatively safe, hence any downloadable file from the site is "safe" too.

Facebook, however, was quick to deny the existence of Locky. In a statement issued by their spokesperson, Facebook said that the issue is not a kind of ransomware rather more of a bad Chrome extensions. They further said that they had made the necessary investigations towards Locky. Despite this, experts still warn both Facebook and Linkedin users to be wary in downloading anything from these social media giants.