Tag: Face book scam

That’s perhaps the most improbable caption I’ve still had to write in my computer security vocation, but never mind…

If that’s the case then they might be intrigue by a note that is dispersal virally across the Face book social net claim to be recording of… and how can I put this precisely? I don’t think I can.. Justin Bieber with an erection.

Messages like the following are being seen:

WTF !! I just saw that Justin Bieber got erection in a public interview.lol

Almost certainly not the kind of message you would characteristically click on from your office computer, but maybe a young teeny bopping music fan in your family would find the subject matter tempting to investigate further.

And if they do click on the link they are taken to a Face book page with the meaning “Justin Bieber gets a boner in Public!!!”, and an invitation to “Click to watch” a video.

The pages contain a graphic claim that the application is a “Face book established app” (which seems unlikely given the subject matter).Would young female fans of Justin Bieber be likely to go further – I suspect so.

As is usual in scams like this on Face book, you are then obtainable with a message from Face book ask you to corroborate that you are happy for the third social gathering request to have all sorts of access to your Face book account – counting the ability to post messages to your wall.

This is your last possibility to be levelheaded, and not put your account at risk. Unluckily far too many people are trick by social engineering to give doubtful third party apps like this full reign to mess around with their Face book accounts. If they’re not using the modern day equivalent of David Cassidy to lure users into granting permission, they’re pretending to be new Face book functionality like “Dislike” buttons, or pretending to be free tickets with an airline.

But if you do make the error of clicking further, then you will find that you are not watching a video of Bieber having trouser trouble, but instead being asked to take a survey. Surveys like this generate revenue for the scammers who are behind the application – they earn charge for every survey that is completed. In the background. Meanwhile, the scoundrel application has ill-treated your social networking account dispersal the spam virally via your wall to your Face book friends and family.

It’s only usual that scams like this will carry on for as long as users continue to fall for silly tricks like this, and the scammers continue to find it monetarily rewarding. If you’ve been hit by a scam like this, remove reference to it from your newsfeed, and revoke the right of rogue applications to access your profile via Account/ Privacy Settings/ Applications and Websites.

I’ve made a YouTube video where I show you how to clean-up your Face book account if you were hit by this or similar scams on Face book:

Don’t not remember – if you know young people who use Face book, you should warn them about scams like this and teach them not to trust every link that is placed in front of them.

It’s preliminary to appear like Face book can’t win next to those who wish to use their overhaul to scam, spam and just cause difficulty. Over the last day or so, a new kind of assault has been dispersal using the phrase “OMG! I can’t believe JUSTIN Bieber did THIS to a girl”.

It leads to a page asking you to confirm a simple math problem to “prevent bots from slowing down the site”. In actuality, it is another click jack-type scheme in which you are asked to type the answer into a box. It doesn’t matter what you type, because it’s a social engineering trick. What you are actually typing is a comment that is used to share the link with your friends on Facebook. You can see the tooltip that says “Add a Comment” in the screenshot.

This bypasses Face book’s recent attempt at detecting likejacking fraud. Links you comment on are not using the same mechanisms that Facebook is monitoring when you click “Like”. Many moons ago, the first Facebook attacks started with illegitimate applications asking for permission to access your wall and spread their messages by spamming your friends through wall posts. While this worked well, it was a bit easy for Facebook to track down and remove the bogus apps.

Early in 2010 we saw the first attempts at like jacking. This technique involves layering one image over the top of a Like button and tricking the victim into clicking something that appears to play a video or a continue button, when in fact they are clicking the Like button hidden underneath. More recently we have seen the attackers trying lots of new techniques. In the past few months we have seen them tagging people in photos they are not in to get you to click, inviting people to fake events and even making you an administrator of a Facebook page that isn’t yours.

While protecting yourself may not be as simple as not clicking anything that says “OMG!” that isn’t a bad start. Be skeptical, understand that messages from your friends may not in fact have been sent to you willingly, and if you are really tempted to click, take a short timeout to conduct a Google/Bing search.As of the time of this writing some of the YouTube videos this scam leads to have been removed by YouTube. However, one video that is still working has over 525,000,000 views since February and thousands of comments in the last 24 hours — in other words, since this Facebook scam has been making the rounds.