Facebook’s issues with security have been well publicized, as well as their issues with keeping your information private. Don’t rest now because it looks like another attack has occurred on the social network giant, compromising at least 45,000 accounts.

The cause of this latest security breach comes in the form of a worm. If you are not aware of what a worm is, in computer terms it is described as a self-replicating program which uses a network to send copies of itself to other computers. Now that the worm has spread across the entire network, and remember the internet is one large network, the worm can perform its intended purpose. In the case of the attack on Facebook the worm called Ramnit, which was modified for Facebook, originally attacked financial institutions compromising online banking sessions and penetrated several corporate networks and stole users log on information.

A security company, Seculert, tracked the worm and found 800,000 machines were infected between September and December, the majority of those machines were found in the UK and France. This is an alert to your online presence whether you have a Gmail account, tweet, your Corporate SSL VPN, Outlook Web Access, or many other logins on the net. The creators of the worms know that many people use the same password for all accounts. Also, be very weary of links sent to you within Facebook, as the goal is to transmit malicious links for you to click on and then they can gain control of corporate networks. In a previous blog post on this site Joe Kuter alluded to how quickly your password can be compromised, so make your passwords long and complex and please do not use the same password for multiple websites.