Facebook users are to be on high alert as the latest round of phishing attacks aimed at Facebook users are circulating using the notorious “account closure” threat as bait. The two most popular threats involve messages being sent to users either telling them their Facebook account needs verification or that they have “violated a policy” – both messages appear to be sent from Facebook and claim failure to respond will result in losing your account.
How these various scams work can vary. The scam that involves Facebook users being sent messages stating their account needs verification is typically using a rogue Facebook application to post from victims accounts and then leads to a typical survey scam (you can read about survey scams here)
In this instance the rogue Facebook applications are sending the following message –
The message relies on a clever piece of social engineering because the scammers knows that the message may alarm naïve Facebook users into thinking that failing to click the link and “verifying their Facebook account” may result in their account being terminated. However the link merely directs to a “permissions installation” page for an application, in this case called “Press allow to Continue”. Installing the application will result in the victim posting the same message from their accounts, and then being directed to a survey scam which requests a user part with much of their personal information to continue “verifying their account”.
The installation page for the rogue Facebook application
Survey scams are incredibly simple to avoid – Never complete surveys after clicking links on Facebook in order to receive something in return.
Another scam that is proving successful is a ruse where the scammers are sending out messages to victims stating their account has been detecting “violating a policy”. The messages appear to be sent from Facebook Security. The social engineering aspect of this scam is similar to the example above as it threatens victims with account closure if they fail to respond. We have seen variants of this scam circulating for many years now and similar scams circulating targeting both Hotmail and Yahoo users. In the case of this scam however, victims are told to either install rogue Facebook applications or visit external websites. In either case the scam is designed to request a victim enter their personal details, including their password, which is then duly stolen by the scammers.
Both of these scams threaten victims by purporting their accounts will be closed if they fail to respond which is proving to be a very successful lure for Facebook scammers recently. If you see any unsolicited contact that claims failing to respond will result in losing your Facebook account you need to treat it as extremely suspicious because you are almost certainly looking at some kind of scam.
