‘Bom Sabado’ Worm Crashes ORKUT

Looks like social networking sites have become soft targets to the hackers. Have you heard the word "Bom Sabado". It means “Good Saturday" in Portuguese, which is the also the official language of Brazil and known to very few percentage of people in the world till last week. But now everyone would have known this not as a word, but as a dreadful worm virus which crashes Google’s Orkut service. It is a cross-site scripting attack which caused orkut flooded with "Bom Sabado" scraps. How it works? Basically it is a JavaScript based worm that spreads itself through Orkut scraps. This worm is an auto generated message which might look like just another scrap from your buddy. The scrap actually embeds a malicious JavaScript code which infects the profile of the person as soon as he opens the scrap page. Soon after this, the code is executed and it will make the user join bot communities automatically. The worm then starts posting similar scraps to the user's friends using his name, thereby spreading it. The worm also steals browser cookies.

Incase if you were affected by this, make sure you clear all your browser cookies and your Orkut password and security question has been changed. It is advisable not to visit any Orkut profile till this script is blocked. Recently, Twitter faced an attack by hackers after a security flaw was unearthed by a user. Soon after, Facebook faced its worst downtime in four years and now its Orkut's turn to be under attack. That is why I mentioned social networking sites as soft target. However they have taken effective steps to solve this issue as soon as possible.