Facebook Phishing Scam Alert

The following is a post from our brand new intern, Angela.  She’ll be sharing stories, tips, and articles she finds useful to our clients.  Please give her a warm welcome to the Keystone blog.

As I was putting different widget applications on my new Netvibes account (which I highly recommend to anyone who does not already have one), I found an article about a phishing scam on Facebook that is spreading through messages.  Its aim is to trick you into visiting a harmful site that looks like Facebook, so they can steal your login information.

I thought it sounded interesting-probably because I’m on Facebook roughly 25 hours a day-so I looked into it a little more and discovered that I have received not only one, but TWO of these messages just a week ago!

The message sent to you is usually from a friend and has a subject line with something simple like, “Hello”, or something more urgent like, “Do it now!” and “Help!” which were the subjects of the two I received. The body of the message says something like “151.im” or, in my case, “Funny fulldig.im.”

In the Facebook message itself, the domain does not show up as a hyperlink so there is no harm in clicking on it. However, if you are a person who doesn’t get on Facebook often and you just check your notification e-mails for updates, then you do have the opportunity to click on it. Most e-mail clients, like Gmail in my case, automatically enable the domain to be a hyperlink within the notification e-mail. So don’t click on it in your real e-mail inbox nor should you copy the domain into your browser. Clicking on the message in your Facebook inbox simply to open it won’t affect you. However, if you have clicked on the link in an e-mail all you have to do is change the password to your Facebook account.

Facebook is aware of the problem and said in regards to it:

“We think this is related to the fbaction.net/fbstarter.com campaign of a couple weeks ago.”

They also said that they are taking steps in cleaning up this mess and posted about those steps in their recent blog post.  Check back for more information as it becomes available.