Facebook Video Scam: World War III Begins

A new dimension to cyber crime was highlighted with the spreading of fake news of the commencement of World War III in the US for invading Iran and Saudi Arabia. This technique of targeting anxious and enthused users searching for news worthy matter was reported by ZDNet on February 3, 2012.

Even Security Firm, Sophos has reported to CNN that this news is ruling the air as curious users are surfing the net vigorously to acquaint with all the updates. However, while surfing, if the user follows the much prompted link in the helm of watching the video coverage of the attack, Adobe Flash player is updated and malware is installed automatically.

In the pursuit of curiosity and adding some zing to the news users follow the fraud news link that takes them to a fake news site. But instead of any video footage, users are rather prompted to share the corrupted link with their Facebook friends. A click to the video thumbnail further triggers a user to update the Adobe Flash, which is nothing but virus.

A status update of the fake news as shown on the blog of Sophos bears the title "F**k :-( [LINK] The Begin of World War 3?"

To determine the nature of the malware, Sophos used a detection kit Troj/Rootkit-KK into the Computer's Windows. The security company also detected the behavior of the malware as HPsus/FakeAV-J.

Till now, Sophos did not declare the origin of this unknown virus and is quite apprehensive about the speed at which the malware is spreading.

Even, the social networking site, Facebook did not respond instantly to a request on the ways that could measure the intensity of the problem. However, according to Chester Wisniewski, Senior Security Advisor at Sophos, numerous ways are there in nature that can update the status of the updates without the knowledge of the user.

Fake news messages and videos have been prevalent in Facebook earlier also. Scammers take the advantage of exploiting users through this medium also due to its popularity. Security experts while explaining the matter acclaimed Facebook to be an appealing online environment medium.

Related article: Facebook Users Should be Careful of a Computer Virus

» SPAMfighter News - 2/10/2012