Facebook Messenger, one of the biggest messaging platforms on the planet, is the target of a very dangerous attack, which could affect you more than you imagine at first glance. Facebook Messenger has over 1.2 billion users worldwide, and this gives hackers the courage to attack it to generate money from gullible users who are fooled by their messages.
Facebook Messenger is the target of a new attack through which hackers try to convince users to open a video file that will instead start a program that mines bitcoins without the users knowing. We are talking about a program that also installs an extension for the Chrome browser, sending messages in the background to friends of Facebook Messenger users asking them to download the same file.
Facebook Messenger is now being attacked by a "miner" program called Digmine, which is basically a malware that spreads with the help of a file that you receive in messages under the name video_xxxx.zip, or an associated one. The moment you open that file from Facebook Messenger, your computer will be immediately infected, if your antivirus does not detect it as dangerous.
Facebook Messenger. BEWARE of this dangerous message
Facebook Messenger is currently only used to infect people who access that file using the Chrome desktop browser, so most people who surf the Internet. If you access that video file from iPhone or Android, then you are safe, because the malware cannot infect mobile platforms even if you see the message through Facebook Messenger.
"We found a new cryptocurrency-mining bot spreading through Facebook Messenger, which we first observed in South Korea. We named this Digmine. Digmine is coded in AutoIt, and sent to would-be victims posing as a video file but is actually an AutoIt executable script. A known modus operandi of cryptocurrency-mining botnets, and particularly for Digmine (which mines Monero), is to stay in the victim's system for as long as possible."
Facebook Messenger is currently being used to attack hundreds of millions of people in Asia, where it was discovered by an American company that develops antivirus solutions for PCs. She claims that when Digmine is installed after accessing via Facebook Messenger, it will also download other files to the computer, which are used to mine bitcoins for the hackers who infected us.
Facebook Messenger is protected by Facebook by deleting the shared links that allow the respective video clip to be downloaded, but here we are talking about a measure that cannot clean everything. Hackers can very easily create other links to distribute malware through Facebook Messenger, so you have to be very careful and not access files from messages received from unknown people.
Facebook Messenger cannot infect you by simply viewing text messages and emoticons, but if you access attachments sent through the platform, then you can be infected very easily.
