Worms on Facebook

Facebook has had a new type of attack hitting its users. Clickjacking. Facebook recently expanded its “Like” feature and hackers have managed to exploit the feature. Although nothing harmful has been detected so far, the Clickjacking attack nevertheless remains a massive annoyance.

The worm propagates itself through the unconscious clicking that a user does. Several intriguing links are shown to a user as something one of their friends “liked”. For example “LOL This girl gets OWNED after a POLICE OFFICER reads her STATUS MESSAGE,” “The Prom Dress That Got This Girl Suspended From School,” “This man takes a picture of himself EVERYDAY for 8 YEARS!!,” are some of the well-known links. When a user clicks on of these links, they are taken initially to a blank page with only a small message saying “click here to continue”. Sneakily hidden on the page is IFrame code. If the user inadvertently clicks on any part of the page, a “Like” message is posted on the user’s profile.

As viral messages go, this has inadvertently turned into one the largest spreads ever. But as mentioned nothing harmful like information theft of malware installations have been detected, relegating this to a prank or annoyance at the most. The ball is squarely in Facebook’s court to fix this issue, as it cannot be handled by any virus scanner. This would mean a review of Facebook’s policy in how it handles “Liking” of external websites; because this could be only the tip of the iceberg, in terms of future Facebook hijacking.

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