Thursday, May 14, 2009

WARNING: New Facebook Phishing Scam Spreading Rapidly

In the last half hour I’ve received multiple emails from people about a new phishing scam making its way around Facebook. The service attracts users to enter their information at a site FBAction. net which displays a fake Face book login page. Within a short amount of time, users that enter their email and password find that their password has been switched and all of their friends have been emailed from the account.

It’s not a very original phishing scam but it definitely works. One user told us that his “guard was down today” and he ended up entering his information. The result is that he can no longer log in to his account. Facebook has been fighting against phishing scams for a while now. Spammers end up hijacking users’ accounts and the posting random wall posts and sending out messages.

Within a short amount of time, millions of users have their accounts taken over. While users don’t end up with spyware installed on their system, they quickly lose access to their account. Facebook will have to stop this phishing scam quickly and then set up a page for users to get their account back. Often times users completely lose their accounts for falling victim to these phishing schemes.

Facebook is aggressive in policing spam as they’ve learned from MySpace where spam at one point rendered the site practically unusable. It has still been a challenging battle and has forced Facebook to invest a substantial amount of resources in to fighting spammers. Facebook has even filed (and won) lawsuits against some of the largest spammers.
With more than two hundred million users, Facebook is an easy target for spammers. My guess is that we’ll see more of these in the near future. Did the FBAction.net phishing scam reach you yet?

See Also
windows spyware removal
top 10 virus removal
Types of Spyware in your computer
Password-Manipulating Virus Spreading
How To Secure Yourself Against Conficker Worm

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