POSTED: Monday, January 9, 2012 - 7:21pm
UPDATED: Thursday, January 19, 2012 - 8:34pm
EL PASO - Nearly 50,000 Facebook users world wide have had their personal information compromised. It's because of a worm, called "ramnit" that spreads through one's networks of friends. The worm sends messages to a user's friends and asks for their Facebook passwords.. Since the message is coming from a friend, it seems safe and many people will give out their passwords to the hackers voluntarily.
Since many people use the same password for multiple services, including for their bank accounts, the damage done by "ramnit" can be quite significant. Internet security professionals recommend keeping separate passwords for all your accounts, and using numbers and special characters in your passwords. Using a password that is not a word found in the dictionary makes it much more difficult for computer viruses and other malware to guess your password by simply trying every single word until it guesses correctly.