Malware worm infects 45,000 Facebook accounts, many in UK

The Ramnit worm, malware designed to raid internet users' bank accounts, has been found to have infiltrated thousands of Facebook users' accounts. Many of the victims are said to be in the UK.

The breach was discovered by cyber threat management firm Seculert, who reported the new development to Facebook.

Login credentials had been stolen from the 45,000 users, most of whom it said were in France and the UK.

The Ramnit worm was first found in April 2010 as malware that infected both Windows executable files and HTML files, stealing information from browser cookies.

But in August this year it is said that the hackers behind Ramnit took things up a few notches, combining several hacking techniques to let the worm gain remote access to banking institutions and other corporate networks. Seculert suggests 800,000 machines were infected just between September and December this year.

Now, Ramnit seems to have been evolved once more. It is presumed the stolen Facebook logins are being used to put malicious links on the pages of friends of infected users, to help this malware spread even further.

In light of this, we'd advise you take even more care than normal when it comes to things posted on Facebook - especially if the language used in posts, or types of links put up, simply don't sit quite right with the person who allegedly posted them. You should also contact them directly if you're suspicious, preferably by another medium.

As a word of warning, Ramnit is also said to spread faster by presuming infected users are using the same password for multiple different social networking platforms, as well as other sites or accounts. Why not make it a New Year's resolution to have a clean-up of your passwords? It can never hurt!