Social networking sites are currently the hottest spots to hang out on the Internet. Grandma has a MySpace page and your little sister is on Facebook. People in nightclubs no longer give out phone numbers, they tell you to find them on Friendster. Even cell phones are in on it with the hot features that link you right to your favorite social spot.
You didn’t think it would remain safe and friendly forever, did you? Facebook allows third party applications to be added and wouldn’t you know, it didn’t take long for someone to figure out they could make some cash exploiting that.
Who hasn’t gotten a little excited to know that someone has a crush on them? Taking advantage of the all too human curiosity seems to be all the rage. Signing in to Facebook, seeing that someone has sent you an invitation to find out who your "secret crush" is, you know you’re going to want to "find out who." That little bit of curiosity is going to cost you and with quite a few people already on Facebook, it’s going to make the authors a very tidy sum.
Of course, you’re going to accept and just skip right over the Secret Crush Terms of Service, you do it all the time and with that one click, you suddenly have the Zango adware/spyware application on your computer. Even more insidious, the application asks you to send the invite to five friends before you can find out who your secret crush is and now, it’s spreading like the flu.
The flirt widget makes use of an iframe hosted by Zango.com and sends you off to a site that asks you to download the Crush Calculator. What you really get is spyware and that’s not really crush-worthy.
Symantec products with updated definitions detect the Zango program as Adware.ZangoSearch. As of the time of this writing the widget has been reportedly removed from Facebook.


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