If you have been getting tempting messages with video links in your accounts in social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Bebo, Friendster and Hi5, beware. Any attempt to download the promised video will make you another victim of Koobface, a worm that could steal critical and personal information from your computer.

The government's India Computer Emergency Response Team has warned that Koobface, a play on the name of social networking site Facebook, comes with an enticing tagline and spreads by spamming the contacts of the victim on networking sites.

With more than 3 million members of Facebook alone in India, Koobface's potential for wreaking havoc on the country's computer systems is immense — a fact that has prompted the government to issue the warning alert.

Typically, Koobface victims get a message from one of their contacts inviting them to click on a video link. The link leads you to a site mimicking the video-sharing site, Youtube. Once there, you are asked whether you want to download a software needed to watch the video.

If you click `yes', the worm gets activated, leaving your computer vulnerable. The worm not only disrupts your internet experience by sending your searches on engines like Google elsewhere and return garbled replies, it also steals data that may have been left in your computer's memory.

If you do or have already been Koobfaced the only way to protect your machine is to delete all files and registry keys that have been added by the worm. Internet users have also been advised by the government agency to install and maintain updated anti-virus software in their computers, as also a desktop firewall, and block ports which are not required.

While you may not be able to notice the worm rummaging through your electronic files searching for personal data, including passwords, the visible signs of the worm would show up on your internet browsing where you would get abnormal results to your searches and be misdirected to other sites.