Thursday, September 9, 2010

FACEBOOK "Like" SCAMS


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If you are a regular user of FB, there is a high chance that you must have seen something like this in your Newsfeed.
 The title will create such a curiosity in one's mind that, you will be forced to click on it. On clicking the link, you will be taken into a website with a "Like" button and with with texts asking you to click on the like button to proceed.
If you click on the Like button, it will be added to your likes and interests [ As per FB documentation, a page you Like will have capability to publish content to your News Feed whenever it pleases to, till you manually remove it ] Once you Liked the page, it will again ask you to share it with your friends as Step2 to view the "Amazing Content".

If you click the Share button, a popup window will come up asking you to Share the content with your friends.If you try to Skip it, an alert window will come saying unless you share this, you won't be able to see the content.
Driven by curiosity and unaware of the consequences, many people will actually share it!!, leading to further propagation of the scam. The result of all these so called "Steps" is that you will be presented with page asking you to perform "Human Verification" by completing a survey!!.Each time someone does a survey, the Scammer get money!! and free publicity, what an amazing marketing strategy!!.
How it is done?

By checking the source code of the page, it can be seen that Scammers are exploiting FB's own social plugin APIs!!.
They have added few Javascript of their own to detect using pressing 'Like' button, also to create an alert if the person refuses to Publish it to friends .

In this particular case, FB's own APIs are being used, and no password stealing code/malware download code has been found.But since 'liked' page has the capability to push content into the user, its very much possible to do worm/Trojan spreading using similar tactics.
Digging deep into the code, the final destination to which user will taken after Liking and Publishing is found.
If you visit this page directly, you will be treated with a page asking to complete the survey.If you act fast enough to hit the 'Escape' key as soon the page is getting loaded to stop the advertisement from getting loaded, you will be able to see the "Actual Amazing Content".

This just one of the hundreds if not thousands SCAMS that being propagated over FB, most of them uses the same tactics.If you have already fallen for one, go to Likes and Interests in your profile and remove the particular page.If you haven't , be careful not be a victim.Happy Facebooking!! :)