Worm steals up to 45000 Facebook account details

9 January 2012 | Category: Software

Thousands of Facebook login details have been stolen overnight by the Ramnit worm.

Usernames and passwords were taken from 45,000 Facebook accounts mainly those of people located in the UK and France according to online security firm Seculert. Facebook have confirmed the security breach, but have suggested that a lot of the data that was stolen was old and out of date.

In recent weeks Facebook has announced that it's increasing its malware protection and is also creating more awareness to users about the potential threats. Social networking websites have become the number one target for hackers because of the amount of personal data that is stored on them.

The worm itself is nearly two years old. It's well known to security experts, but until now has caused little damage.