Beware of another Facebook scam !

by lalith | May 25, 2009 at 10:09 am
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US: Have you been hit like millions of Facebook users by a new phishing scam that can result in crashing your computers or mobile phones and steal your passwords?

If not, beware, do not open the files ending with ".at" or ".be".

The phishing scam is being run through the spam messages which steals the sensitive information of the Facebook users.

In the attack, the messages are circulated with a subject line of "Hello" and a prompt to check out "areps.at" or other URLs ending in ".at".

The mails with the subject line "Look at This" and links like -- goldbase.be, greenbuddy.be, silvertag.be, picoband.be -- leads to some malicious Web sites, which if visited, could secretly download malware onto computers through a "drive-by download" application.

Facebook being one of the most successful social sites on the web today, naturally is bing played with by hackers, phishers, and just plain mischief makers. Through sheer inquisitiveness, millions of the younger generation using Facebook have fallen prey to these scams. One such program so cleverly invented by mischief makers, make the user go in to a second, fake Facebook site.

The phishers try to obtain e-mail addresses, passwords etc in order to go further by getting profiles profiles and personal data of users, most of the time to commit fraud.

"Whoever is behind the scam has been steadily amassing a large number of e-mail addresses and passwords over the past few weeks," the blog says.

Though, Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt said: "The impact of this attack or the previous ones are not widespread and only impacted a tiny fraction of a per cent of users.

"We've been updating our monitoring systems with information gleaned from the previous attacks so that each new attack is detected more quickly," he said.

The site has blocked links to the new phishing sites from being shared on Facebook and has added them to the block lists of the major browsers.

Facebook groups mushroom by the thousands daily. In sheer enthusiasm, users tend to forget the security aspect of using a social site. All users should be made aware using all means of media and on the log in page of this danger.

For what ever it is worth, it is always better to change one's password as often as possible.

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Narada

I nearly got hit. Change passwords often. This will save you a lot of trouble.

This story was created over 3 months ago, the comment thread is now closed.

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