We wanted to alert you about a virus going around right now which is being spread primarily via facebook. It takes the form of a message sent to your facebook inbox from someone on your friends list – the message will have a little bit of text and a link to a website which seems legitimate, at which point a flash-based video will begin playing. After going for a few seconds, a message will pop up saying you need to update flash player. If you click okay, you will install the virus.

This is a particularly difficult virus to spot, so we wanted to make everyone aware of it as soon as possible.

It’s a good example of the latest trendy viruses which disguise themselves as updates to programs such as flash or quicktime. If you see a message asking you to update a software package like this, we would recommend closing the popup and navigating directly to the appropriate site (i.e. http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/) to download the update (in this case, there isn’t a real update since it’s a hoax). If you’re not sure which site to navigate to, you can usually type the name of the software in a google search and find it that way. This is a good habit to get into, since it will help protect you against update scams via popups, such as this one.

If you’ve accidentally installed the virus, you should open your antivirus client and run any available updates, and then a full scan – it should find and quarantine or remove it. It would also be a good idea to change your facebook password.