2008 is coming.. is it the year of the worms?

Is 2008 the year of the worm? Of course it's not, but the latest buzz on the social networking scene is about a worm spreading on Orkut with the message "2008 vem ai… que ele comece mto bem para vc." This translates to "2008 is coming…I wish that it begins quite well for you".

For those who are not familiar with Orkut (and there's a lot of those), it's a social network owned by Google similar to MySpace and Facebook. Though it is not popular in the US, it's a big hit in Brazil (also India), in the same way that Friendster is like the national website of us pinoys here in the Philippines.

According to an alert from anti-virus specialist Trend Micro, infection starts when an Orkut user is sent an e-mail telling them that they have a new Scrapbook entry.. you know, wall posts? comments? testi(monials)?. Logging into Orkut, the victim is greeted with that Portuguese-language message above. Once a user becomes infected, the infected account downloads and executes an embedded Javascript that sends a copy of the original Scrapbook post to all the victim's contacts.

There are jokes saying that "Google has responded quickly. Too bad. If Google had let the worm rampage, maybe some American users might actually hear about Orkut for the first time."

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technorati tags: orkut, worm, google