Alert! Facebook Password Reset Confirmation Email Contains Virus

E-Holes have ramped up their scamming and spamming recently, flooding social media with insidious attempts to lure users into their traps. Is it a coincidence the black hats have increased their activity just as a significant chunk of Facebook’s recent growth comes from newbies in search of photos of the grandchildren?

Please Nana, don’t click on that link!

Mashable is now warning of a new virus spreading via Facebook. This one – known as Bredolab – masks itself as a “Password Reset Confirmation Email,” appears to come from Facebook, and attaches a file that purports to contain a new password.

That file is actually a trojan horse that will download a host of nasty files from the Web and infect your computer with them. Email security firm MX Lab explains further:

“Bredolab is a trojan horse that downloads and executes files from the Internet, such as rogue anti-spyware. To bypass firewalls, it injects its own code into legitimate processes svchost.exe and explorer.exe. Bredolab contains anti-sandbox code (the trojan might quit itself when an external program investigates its actions).”

How to avoid this E-Hole Epidemic: Did you request your password from Facebook? If not, you shouldn’t be getting a password reset confirmation email. So don’t open it! And even if you did ask for one, Facebook would not send your new password as an attachment. Finally, f you’re still not sure, take a look at the full details of the email – if the mail servers don’t belong to Facebook, you know the message is not legit.