Social networking sites are currently thehottest spots to hang out on the Internet. Grandma has a MySpace pageand your little sister is on Facebook. People in nightclubs no longergive out phone numbers, they tell you to find them on Friendster. Evencell phones are in on it with the hot features that link you right toyour favorite social spot.
You didn’t think it would remain safe and friendly forever, did you?Facebook allows third party applications to be added and wouldn’t youknow, it didn’t take long for someone to figure out they could makesome cash exploiting that.
Who hasn’t gotten a little excited to know that someone has a crushon them? Taking advantage of the all too human curiosity seems to beall the rage. Signing in to Facebook, seeing that someone has sent youan invitation to find out who your "secret crush" is, you know you’regoing to want to "find out who." That little bit of curiosity is goingto cost you and with quite a few people already on Facebook, it’s goingto make the authors a very tidy sum.
Of course, you’re going to accept and just skip right over theSecret Crush Terms of Service, you do it all the time and starting withthat one click, you could suddenly have an adware/spyware applicationon your computer. Even more insidious, the application asks you to sendthe invite to five friends before you can find out who your secretcrush is and now, it’s spreading like the flu.
The flirt widget made use of an iframe hosted by Zango.com to sendyou off to a site that asks you to download the Crush Calculator. Whatyou really get is adware/spyware and that’s not really crush-worthy.
Symantec products with updated definitions detect the Zango program as Adware.ZangoSearch. As of the time of this writing the widget has been reportedly removed from Facebook.