This week
Brian Krebs the writer for Security Fix on The Washington Post contacted us, after he found our website
http://www.lococitato.com/ He had come across a trove of data stolen by a single keystroke logger, which appeared to be in operation between June and September of 2007. During that time, the criminal(s) responsible for distributing that keylogger ensnared some 10,000 victims, stealing more than 20 gigabytes worth of stored user names and passwords, as well as credentials passed when victims logged in to any sites that required credentials.
Now there is no evidence to suggest that this virus used MySpace pages to infect PC’s, but Brian was interested in how many of these infected users were releated to each other through MySpace and other social networking sites.So we started to run a few experiments.
The first simple experiment was to work out how many of those infected were friends with others on MySpace, that is were directly connected. This proved to be disappointing only 4 relationships showed up.At this point we nearly gave up, but we decided to run a more complicated experiment and see how many of those infected are friend of friends of other infected users. This took a lot longer to run.
Finally we found that 71 of the infected users are contained within a network of 1148 total users. See the network below.We are sure if we dug deeper we would find more connections, but what does this all this prove? Well we’re all connected much more than we think. And what surprises us is not that viruses exist but that they are not more successful.