Facebook Dislike hype exploited in phishing campaign
Mon 21 Sep 2015
A new Facebook scam is quickly spreading across the social network which plays on the announcement of the highly-anticipated ‘Dislike’ button.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg discussed the proposed feature in an interview last week, confirming that there would be a public launch “very” soon. The social media giant has long considered adding a dislike or ‘empathise’ button for posts that may contain sad news, to avoid inappropriate ‘liking’.
A new scamming campaign is now exploiting impatient Facebook users anxiously awaiting the dislike button addition, by tricking them into believing that they can click on a link to gain early access to the feature.
The scam link, titled ‘Get newly introduced Facebook dislike button on your profile’, has been specifically designed to spread rapidly across Facebook as an ‘invite-only’ feature.
Once the unsuspecting victim selects a link, they are led to a malicious website, which enables access to their private Facebook accounts and allows the hackers to share further scam links on their behalf.
The user will then be prompted to complete an intrusive phishing survey in an effort to gain personal information including bank account details. It is thought that some of the scam links also contain malware to infect a user’s computer and additional social media pages.
Facebook is an extremely appealing platform for scammers and hackers, due to the speed of potential propagation. In August, Sanford Wallace or ‘Spam King’, infamous for his fraudulent marketing campaigns, was found guilty of plaguing over 27 million Facebook accounts. In a similar strategy, Wallace deceived people into handing over their login credentials, which he then used to access the accounts and send out spam messages to other users.
A further scam attack in June, saw many users in India hit by an embarrassing porn spam ware, which littered their timelines and private messages with malicious links to pornographic videos and images.
