Webware

Someone is using Orkut to spread Trojan links in a message disguised as an official e-mail from the Google-owned social network, according to an alert from security firm Websense released Tuesday.

The message, written in Portuguese to appeal to Orkut's many Brazilian members, looks like it is sent from an Orkut member who is looking for love, Websense says.

"The message contains several links that appear to lead to the official Orkut Web site. Clicking on a link actually leads to a malicious executable file, which is a Trojan Downloader named 'imagem.exe,'" the Websense alert says. "The malicious file opens the legitimate Orkut network log-in page, and in the background downloads a password stealing Trojan named 'msn.exe.'"

The Trojans are hosted on a compromised labor union Web site from southern Brazil, according to Websense.

A Google spokesman said the company was investigating the matter.

In this screenshot from Facetime, clicking the link for a photo album could get your computer infected.

(Credit: Facetime)

In yet another new way to infect people, criminal hackers are using a Twitter page, according to one security researcher.

In a blog, Chris Boyd, director of malware research for Facetime, explained how a Twitter page is being used to lure victims. To lend credibility to his discovery, the Twitter page lists 17 followers, however each appeared to be fraudulent. Boyd said Twitter had been notified.

The messages, written in Portuguese, attempt to get visitors to download a photo album. In order to view the album, you'll need to download a Flash update, which is really the infection files themselves. Boyd and his team have identified the infection as Orkon.

Once installed, the infected files do various things to the compromised desktop, such as attempt to gain your Orkut account log-in information, or displaying a browser image of a man identifying himself as the "Trickster."

Orkut has been targeted in the past. Here, the infection itself is not so interesting, as is use of Twitter as a vector. Boyd recommends that even if you don't use Orkut, if you see a Twitter page referencing an Orkut photo album, stay away.

Google's Orkut social network isn't just big in Brazil. It's also popular in India, especially among software developers, according to a new survey.

Despite Facebook's efforts to promote that social network as the platform of choice for third-party application developers, Orkut is used by twice as many software programmers in India than either Facebook or MySpace, according to an Evans Data survey of more than 300 developers in India. Software programmers in that country are heavy users of social networks in general.

Seventy-three percent of those surveyed said they had used Orkut, compared with 35 percent for Facebook and 32 percent for MySpace.

"Capturing mindshare with developers in fast-growing emerging development markets like India and Brazil gives them (Google) a strategic advantage going forward in further cultivating this very important community," Evans Data Chief Executive John Andrews said in a statement.

Google has released new domains specific to India and Brazil as a result of the popularity in those countries.

The independent survey was conducted in late May and early June.

And now, the latest in social network developer platform announcements: Orkut, the community site owned by Google, has rolled out a directory of applications to its users in India and will continue to expand geographically over the next few weeks.

India, along with Brazil, is one of Orkut's main hubs of popularity; in Brazil, it faces many of the same issues that massive social networks like Facebook and MySpace do in the U.S. Despite having been developer in-house in Google's Mountain View, Calif.-based headquarters, the site has never really taken off stateside. Meanwhile, rival MySpace is currently launching an India-centric portal that will compete with Orkut.

Here's something interesting: At least for the time being, Orkut users are limited to 25 applications per profile. Google representatives were not immediately available for comment on whether this is permanent restriction.

Announcements about social network developer platforms are a dime a dozen, now that Facebook's example made developer applications practically mandatory, but Orkut has drawn particular attention because it's owned by Google. The OpenSocial API, on which Orkut's platform is based, was launched by Google last year.

Google has since announced that it will relinquish control of OpenSocial, turning the project into a nonprofit organization in collaboration with Yahoo, News Corp.'s MySpace.com, and other partners.

Google product manager Amar Gandhi announced in a blog post on Tuesday night that there have been "a couple of modifications" to the company's release of OpenSocial compatibility for its Orkut social network.

In other words, there appears to be some red tape. Instead of immediately rolling out the Orkut platform, which it was originally scheduled to do right around now, Google will be conducting a "prelaunch testing period" for select applications. That will last about four weeks.

"We apologize for delaying the launch a few weeks," Gandhi wrote. "We feel that this prelaunch testing period will ensure that users are introduced to apps in the best way possible."

Avid followers of Google's OpenSocial developer initiative have been eagerly anticipating the standard's debut on Orkut. After all, this is the closest thing to an in-house Google developer platform, and if it works well, this could help Orkut emerge as a whole lot more than "that social network that's big in Brazil and India."

For those cranky pundits already hunting for the next Facebook, Orkut has been the subject of much scrutiny.

The Social Times notes that MySpace.com's developer platform is also slated to go live next week, and it wonders whether it's still on track because it also implements OpenSocial.

I've contacted MySpace representatives for comment and will update this post when I hear back.

Update Dec. 20 with Google comment

A computer worm has been spreading on Google's big-in-Brazil Orkut social network, according to a report on the Sounds from the Dungeon blog.

The relatively harmless worm appears to use JavaScript and Flash code to create new scrapbook entries on profiles with a New Year's message in Portuguese before propagating to the victim's friends.

It may have infected as many as 400,000 users, according to a post on a blog called "c0d3w12."

According to the Packet Storm security site, a vulnerability affecting Orkut was discovered November 8 and fixed last week. It was not clear whether this was the same vulnerability that was allowing the worm to spread.

"It appears Google has responded quickly," writes a blogger on ValleyWag. "Too bad. If Google had let the worm rampage, maybe some American users might actually hear about Orkut for the first time."

A Google representative sent this e-mail comment: "Google takes the security of our users very seriously. We worked quickly to implement a fix for the issue recently reported in orkut. We also took steps to help prevent similar problems in the future. Service to orkut was not disrupted during this time."

MySpace.com announced Friday that it has launched a localized site in Brazil, making it the site's 20th regional edition and the first one to be entirely in Portuguese. To spearhead the new MySpace site, the News Corp.-owned social network has hired Emerson Calegaretti as general director of MySpace Brazil and Haryston Oliveira as marketing director.

In addition to the main U.S. site, there are already localized MySpace sites for Canada, Latin America, Mexico, Australia, Finland, Germany, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the U.K., Denmark, France, Ireland, Netherlands, Spain, Austria, Japan and New Zealand.

As a kickoff for the new Brazilian site, MySpace is throwing a "Secret Show" concert on December 19 featuring the rock band NX Zero. While little-known in the U.S., NX Zero took home several awards at the Brazilian edition of MTV's Video Music Awards this year. According to a release from MySpace, 55,000 bands from Brazil already have profiles on the site.

Social networking is big in Brazil, but MySpace is going to have serious competition in the form of Orkut. The Google-owned service famously failed to catch on in the U.S. but spread like wildfire in Brazil, with over 55 percent of the site's nearly 70 million members reporting that as their home country.

But one advantage to MySpace may be that Orkut is designed for the 18+ crowd and focuses on networking and dating, not music and pop culture. MySpace's appeal to teenagers and music fans could fill a different niche, but it's a stretch--Brazil is one country where a single site more or less totally dominates the social-networking landscape.

When Facebook confirmed widespread blog rumors that it would be making a major advertising announcement on November 6, a few people pointed out that this date may have been a strategic one. The previous day, November 5, had been widely rumored as the day when Google would leverage its Orkut social network along with a host of other software properties (Google Reader, perhaps, or new acquisition Jaiku) into a powerful social networking tool to rival Facebook's.

But now Google has allegedly delayed its own announcement by several days, according to reports. A TechCrunch source claims that the project "needs more time," which seems a bit incongruous for a delay of less than a week. Two weeks, sure. But three or four days?

Here's a thought: perhaps Google was concerned that its "open platform" announcement would be superseded the next day by a glitzy Facebook event that was aiming squarely at Google's own AdSense. Google saw Facebook (and Microsoft) steal its thunder last week when Redmond's $240 million minority stake in the social network was announced in the final hours of Google Analyst Day--and an ultimately disappointing Analyst Day at that, as the widely rumored "GPhone" failed to materialize. (Lofty cosmo-talk from Vint Cerf failed to pull the Facebook-Microsoft deal further down in the headlines.)

If Google and Facebook were going to be making similar announcements, it'd be a scramble between the two companies to be the first one out of the gate. But that's not the case--Google has a phenomenally successful online advertising business and is brewing up a social media strategy, whereas Facebook is the hottest social media brand around but is building its online advertising base. In this situation, it's not about who can make the announcement first, but whose announcement has the real buzz power.

When Facebook launched its developer platform in May, it was the hottest topic in tech enthusiast circles for weeks afterward; the hype still hasn't died down. The rumored "SocialAds" event will be the biggest announcement out of the company since then, and its placement in the middle of New York's AdTech conference guarantees that it'll be high-profile.

There are few companies that could divert attention from Google. Facebook, unfortunately for Mountain View, is one of them.

Statistics house ComScore released some numbers on Tuesday pertaining to how quickly a handful of popular social-networking sites are growing worldwide, and which ones dominate in which regions of the globe. There's nothing all too notable here, as the global reach of various social-networking sites has been well-documented already--and even mapped. But it's always cool to see numbers, which I suppose is why companies like ComScore exist in the first place.

The main set of numbers tracks worldwide social-networking growth, with June 2006 and June 2007 as the benchmarks, for seven services: MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Orkut, Hi5, Friendster, and Tagged. Tagged, one of the smaller and newer of the bunch, showed the greatest overall growth--a 774 percent increase from 1,506,000 unique visitors in June 2006 to 13,167,000 unique visitors in June 2007. That could be because the San Francisco-based social network simply wasn't on the map until recently; it was founded in 2004 but scored its first round of venture capital in February 2006.

Facebook has, as one may imagine, also grown quite a bit--270 percent, from 14,083,000 uniques to 52,167,000. ComScore charts Bebo as having grown about 172 percent, and Orkut as having grown about 78 percent.

Friendster might be considered an also-ran, at least in the U.S., but according to ComScore's statistics, it's growing almost as quickly as MySpace: 65 percent versus 72 percent. That being said, Friendster's unique visits went from around 15 million to around 25 million, while MySpace's went from about 66.5 million to over 114 million, so we're clearly dealing with vastly different magnitudes here.

Interestingly enough, Hi5, which I've heard talked about as a rising star in the social-networking world, has been growing at a crawl compared with the others--only 56 percent growth from June 2006 to June 2007.

The ComScore statistics also charted where visits to social-networking sites are coming from, based on worldwide region: Out of the seven social-networking sites, the two with the most "balanced" user bases worldwide are Tagged and Hi5. Tagged, according to the ComScore numbers, has 22.7 percent of its base from North America, 14.6 from Latin America, 23.4 from Europe, 10 from Africa and the Middle East, and 29.2 percent from Asia and the Pacific region. Hi5, similarly, is 15.3 percent North American, 24.1 percent Latin American, 31 percent European, 8.7 percent African/Middle Eastern, and 20.8 percent Asia-Pacific.

MySpace and Facebook both have large percentages of their users in North America (62.1 percent for MySpace, 68.4 percent for Facebook) with sizeable portions in Europe (24.7 percent for MySpace, 16.8 percent for Facebook) and single-digit numbers in all other regions. Bebo, most popular in the U.K., is largely the opposite, with 62.5 percent of its users based in Europe, 21.8 percent in North America, and few elsewhere.

Orkut, famous for having a user base virtually restricted to Brazil and India, understandably has almost half its user base in Latin America, almost half in Asia-Pacific, and almost none anywhere else. Friendster, meanwhile, leans the most disproportionately toward a single geographic market: it gathers nearly 89 percent of its user base from the Asia-Pacific region.