A recently uncovered malware attack targeting Facebook users has claimed nearly 10,000 victims in just under two days, with countries in South America and Europe among the hardest hit.

Between 24 and 27 June, thousands of Facebook users were targeted by phishing messages purporting to come from a “friend”, claiming to have mentioned the targeted users on Facebook. However, the message had in fact been initiated by attackers instigating a two-stage attack.

The malware was uncovered by a security researcher at Kaspersky Lab, pointing to a two-stage malware that includes a Trojan.

Several security researchers have discovered a new type of malware that jumps onto the ransomware bandwagon, encrypting victims' files and then demanding a payment of half a bitcoin for the key. Named "Locky," the malware depends on a rather low-tech installation method to take root in a user's system: it arrives courtesy of a malicious macro in a Word document.

Security researchers Kevin Beaumont and Lawrence Abrams each wrote an analysis of Locky on Tuesday, detailing how it installs itself and its components. The carrier document arrives in an e-mail that claims to be delivering an invoice (with a subject line that includes an apparently random invoice number starting with the letter J). When the document is opened, if Office macros are turned on in Word, then the malware installation begins. If not, the victim sees blocks of garbled text in the Word document below the text, "Enable macro if the data encoding is incorrect"—and then infects the system if the user follows that instruction.

What it is…

Cyberbullying is a form of violence that is rampant among people who have moved away from physical assault to the modern way of abuse through the screen of a device. This is a person’s harassment that happens from another person deliberately via technology and it can take different kind of forms. 

The most common targeted groups of people…

Usually the most “dangerous” age of our life is the teenage period, that’s why the usual chosen victims of cyberbullying are teenagers. More than 1 in 3 young people have experienced cyber-threats online. This generation is very well familiarized with technology, they know how to use a computer, a laptop and a smartphone very well, but they are not able to know the dangers that they may incur in the internet world.