Stegobots can cheat FB users

You may want to think twice before uploading photos on social networking sites like Facebook. As part of a security experiment, researchers from the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, New Delhi, and University of Illinois in the US created a Stegobot — a new generation botnet — which could exploit Facebook images and steal information from unsuspecting users.

Unlike conventional botnets – distributed networks of infected computers and owned by a human controller called the botherder, Stegobots contact botmasters directly and piggyback on the infected user’s normal social network activity.