Just a quick warning to those of you who are based in Europe, specifically the UK and France – security experts have warned that 45,000 Facebook login credentials have been stolen by a computer worm.
According to the security firm Seculert, the data has been largely stolen from accounts in the UK and France by a notorious piece of malware known as Ramnit, which has been around since April 2010 and was used in the past to steal banking details.
The researchers behind the discovery suspect that the attackers responsible for this hack are using the stolen passwords to log in to Facebook users’ accounts and then send malicious links to their friends in order to expand the malware’s spread even further.
For more information about the Ramnit worm, visit the Seculert blog, and there is further comment on the Technology page of the BBC News website.
Suffice to say, the best course of action for Facebook users who are worried about this is to change your password. As a matter of good practice, changing passwords regularly helps to keep your online accounts that little bit safer, and as the virtual world expands, we create more and more of these accounts. Unfortunately, most of us resort to using the same email address and password for a lot of these accounts, so if this information does fall into the wrong hands, it can be a lot worse than just finding your Facebook account hacked.