The troubles with using Facebook seem to never end. A recent study carried out by an internet security firm, Seculert has revealed that a variant of the popular Ramnit worm has been crawling the Facebook pages of thousands of users and stealing their login information. From September to December, 2011, the worm managed to steal around 45,000 user’s private data. The users are mostly from Britain and France and nearly 800,000 computers have been infected.

The worm spreads via posting rigged links on people’s walls and thus gaining access to their information and then, it uses that information to target the people’s online bank accounts. It makes use of the fact that people tend to keep the same password for multiple online accounts (be it banking, email etc) and uses that information to crack nearly all of the person’s online accounts.

The firm Seculert wrote in a blog post, “Ramnit can bypass two-factor authentication and transaction signing systems, gain remote access to financial institutions, compromise online banking sessions and penetrate several corporate networks,”

Facebook has issued a statement, “

Our security experts have reviewed the data, and while the majority of the information was out-of-date, we have initiated remedial steps for all affected users to ensure the security of their accounts.

Source: The Inquirer

The worm Ramnit was first found out in April 2010 when it corrupted Windows executable files and internet HTML to get access to FTP details and browser cookies. In August, however, the firm Seculert has determined that the hackers made good use of the leaked trojan Zeus’s source code, and made a hybrid worm which could hack at large.