The latest attack aimed at compromising the desktop security of social networking users is a spam message carried out using Facebook to convince users to upload malware onto their hard drives, according to McAfee. The message claims to be from Facebook administrators and informs the recipients that they must change their password.

Rather than providing a link to a Facebook page where the password can safely be changed, the message includes a file that people must click on. Once the file is opened, the malware is uploaded and the computer becomes infected. Anyone who receives this or any other message should be warned that Facebook does not handle passwords in this manner.

"The activity on this particular scam run has been global from the beginning, and thanks to our Artemis 'cloud' technology we have dealt with it very efficiently,” McAfee said on its blog. "The malware in the attachment is pretty much what one would expect: downloaders, password-stealing Trojan, fake-AV or bot stuff."

It is imperative that Facebook users be alerted to this threat due to the recently revealed popularity of the website. As if having more than 400 million users worlwide wasn't enough, Facebook recently surpassed Google as the most frequently visited page by American users.ADNFCR-2553-ID-19679616-ADNFCR