Social networking site Facebook has warned its users to stay away from new malware that encourages them to click on a 'sexiest video ever' link and end up with installing the virus on their computer systems.

Thousands of users on the social networking site have been targeted by the new scam which asks users to click on the video link, addressing the user by name, and then leads to the installation of a malware, the Daily Mail reported.
The link reads: "This is without doubt the sexiest video ever! :P :P :P" and is accompanied by a video entitled "Candid Camera Prank [HQ]", featuring shots of a busty woman in a bikini and short skirt.

The user is tricked into believing they are downloading a new version of a popular video programme, when in fact they are downloading the malware, said the report.

The file downloaded also appears to contain adware Hotbar -- a toolbar which appears in Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer, it added.

Graham Cluely from security software developer Sophos said: "Judging by the number of messages posted on Facebook, thousands of people received this attack.

"If you were one of them, you should scan your computer with an up-to-date anti-virus, change your passwords, review your Facebook application settings, and learn not to be so quick as to fall for a simple social engineering trick like this in future."

Once the link has been clicked on, it is then posted on that user's news feed -- causing the virus to spread virally throughout the website.

Facebook has recently been criticised by European data protection officials for putting users' privacy at risk with changes to its service, which allows third-party websites to access users' profiles.
From: Hindustantimes

if you don't want the service sharing things about you automatically with everyone you know Facebook launched some fairly impressive new features and services at its recent f8 conference, but some of them were also more than just a little scary.

Since a lot of what the company talked about was introduced either in "developer speak"—involving such terms as API and JSON—or involved social networking jargon such as "social graph" and "activity map," we thought it would be handy to break it down for those who aren't as well-versed in such things. What should you do if you don't like the prospect of automatically sharing your activity with everyone you know on Facebook?
Liking without logging in:

The biggest change Facebook has launched will let any Web site you visit display a simple "like" button, for example on a story at CNN.com—although CNN has decided to use the term "recommend" instead. If you click that button, it will show all your friends on Facebook that you liked that story by posting it on your Facebook wall. It will also show you—in the same box on the CNN (TWX) site that has the "recommend" button—how many of your friends liked that story.

Note: The most important aspect of this feature is that CNN and other sites will be able to do this without you logging in with a user name and password and without you clicking any Facebook Connect buttons. All that is required is that you have signed in to Facebook at some point before you visit the site.

Instant personalization:

As my colleauge Liz Gannes explained in her Apr. 22 post, some sites will be allowed to take this ability even further, showing users personalized content based on the details of their public profile on Facebook.The company will be able to read and interpret that content without asking users. At the moment, only three sites have this extra ability, which Facebook calls "instant personalization"—they are Docs.com (an online document-hosting and editing site from Microsoft), the music site Pandora, and the review site Yelp.

Note: The important thing to note about this feature is that it is opt-in by default, which means it is turned on automatically—and you have to specifically turn it off if you don't want these services to read your profile and customize their services for you.

What should you do?

The easiest way out of all these new features is, of course, simply not to log in to Facebook or to deactivate your account. To do the latter, you have to go to this page, down at the bottom, and click "deactivate."

Note: Doing this doesn't actually cancel your Facebook account; it simply hides it. As Facebook explains on its help pages, "your profile and all information associated with it are immediately made inaccessible to other Facebook users.What this means is that you effectively disappear from the Facebook service.However, if you want to reactivate at some point, we do save your profile information (friends, photos, interests, etc.)." If you actually want to delete it, you have to go here.

But what if you don't want to cancel your account? Then you can do one of several things:

• • Turn off instant personalization: Uncheck the box at the bottom of this page. This will prevent Facebook from allowing Pandora, Docs.com, and Yelp to show you customized content based on your Facebook details.

But as the site Librarian By Day explains, this won't prevent your friends from sharing certain data about you with those services. And how do you stop that?

• • Block those applications: If you don't want any information to be shared with those specific apps, either by you or by your friends, you must specifically block each and every one of those apps (luckily, there are only three so far).

You can control which applications are allowed to share your data, as well as what your friends can share about you, on this page. All your privacy settings—such as what turns up when people search for you, whom you have blocked, and so on—can be controlled on this page.

• • Don't click the "like" button at any of the sites you visit: This will prevent you from sharing that information with your Facebook friends, or having it show up on your wall, and sites won't be able to send updates to your news feed.

Twitter is starting to go on a mobile acquisition binge, as for the second time in one month it has bought out a start-up developer that specializes in mobile messaging.

On Friday, Twitter posted a message on its official blog that it has purchased Cloudhopping, a company that specializes in mass texting campaigns for advertisements and product promotions.

"Twitter processes close to a billion SMS tweets per month and that number is growing around the world from Indonesia to Australia, the UK, the US, and beyond," wrote Twitter in its blog post.
For a company that generates so much usage over the mobile space, Twitter has been surprisingly lax in devoting a lot of resources to mobile phone infrastructure. It simply made its platform open to all developers, and let individual app makers do the work. That is, until recently.

Earlier this month, Twitter bought out the maker of the #1 mobile Tweeting app, and this most recent acquisition gives the company a very solid standing in its push to expand the mobile market.

As part of the acquisition, Twitter receives all of Cloudhopper's infrastructure, and both of the people behind the small start-up will become official Twitter employees.

The social network Facebook announced it has abandoned a lighter version of its site after running for just seven months. It is without much explanation that the networking giant announced on its fan page that the company had decided to no longer support this version of Facebook.

Facebook Lite was launched in order to please those who hate the crowded pages of content, and access to internet limited by low bandwidth, particularly in developing countries.

Facebook Lite, similar in its use of the Facebook from a mobile phone, was “a simplified version to download fast, Facebook, allowing among other users to post comments, accept new friends or view photos.
Facebook Lite was first tested in India and other countries.

Twitter has confirmed last week that it has grown exponentially in recent years, claiming 100 million users and 300,000 new registrants per day.

Facebook, meanwhile, boasts more than 400 million users.

“It would seem not enough people were using it but then there was not a lot of awareness about the product. Tears will not be shed over the loss of Facebook Lite,” Nick O’Neil of AllFacebook.com added.

“We do not offer more but we learned a lot by testing a streamlined site, argued the direction of Facebook in a message on his website. “If you use the site + + Lite, you will now be redirected to the main site Facebook.com.

The world's biggest social network has revealed details of a stripped-down, text-only version of its mobile site called Facebook Zero.

The low-bandwidth site is aimed at people viewing Facebook on their mobile and will launch "in the coming weeks".

The social network recently said that more than 100 million people now access Facebook from their phone.

Analysts at CCS Insight said that the new site could help operators free-up critical bandwidth on their networks.
Data from industry body the GSM Association recently revealed that Facebook accounts for nearly half of all the time people in the UK spend going online using their phones.

The data showed that people in the UK spent around 2.2bn minutes browsing the social network during December alone.

Facebook said the new site "omits data intensive applications like photos".

"We are discussing it... as an option to make Facebook on the mobile web available to everyone, anywhere and allow operators to encourage more mobile internet usage," said a spokesperson for the firm.

Facebook already offers a slimmed down version of the version of its site - called Facebook Lite - for people with slow or poor internet connections. It is aimed at users in the developing world.

The site was announced at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, which runs from 15-18 February.