Facebook scams are on a sprawl. Almost everyday we’re seeing new scams and spams popping on Facebook and using social engineering techniques on the ubiquitous social network to trick users into clicking malicious code. The latest messages that are spreading rapidly across Facebook trick users into clicking on links claiming to show an amazing video of a big baby being born, reports Sophos Labs.
The messages are spreading with the assistance of a clickjacking scam (sometimes known as likejacking) which means that users do not realise that they are invisibly pressing a “Like” button to pass the message onto their online friends.
A typical message looks as follows:
Baby Born Amazing Effect – WebCamera
[LINK]
Big Baby Born !
“The links we have seen so far all point to pages hosted on blogspot.com, and appear to contain a video player that you are urged to click on. The pages are headlined: “Baby Born Video – Amazing Effects”,” explains Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos.
See the message at the bottom of the page? It reads:
If Play Button don’t work please click on the Like button and Confirm, then you can watch the Video.
It’s at this point that the clickjacking scam plays its part. If you try to play the video then you will be secretly and unwittingly saying that you “Like” the link, and sharing it with your friends. In this way the link spreads virally.
It’s a shame that Facebook’s own security measures don’t warn about this clickjacking attack.
If you were running anti-clickjacking protection, such as the NoScript add-on for Firefox, then you would see a warning message about the attempted clickjacking:
Unfortunately, thousands of Facebook users appear to have fallen for the scam – and are helping the links spread rapidly across the social network.
Sophos suggests the following steps to clean-up your Facebook page.
Find the offending message on your Facebook page, and select “Remove post and unlike”.
Unfortunately that doesn’t completely remove the interloping link. You also need to go into your profile, choose Activities and Interests and remove any pages that you don’t want to “Like”.
Users need to be careful before ‘liking’ any page on Facebook as this is a trap that’s a little complex for a non-techy user to come out of. Facebook recently added new features to combat clickjacking techniques, but evidently that doesn’t seem to be a deterrent for spammers and scammers.
Infosec India 