14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook scammers are trying to capitalize on the news of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden's death by using the event as lure to trick users into spreading spam and participating in rogue surveys.
The killing of bin Laden by a US special operations team was the most important event covered by news agencies on Monday and attracted a lot of attention from Internet users, especially American ones.
As with any widely covered event, cyber criminals have wasted no time in trying to exploit it for their own benefit.
On Facebook, one of the main platforms for spreading scams, there are several ongoing malicious campaigns using bin Laden's death as lure.
One of them spreads through internal chat messages and advertises a video of the killing. It leads users to a Facebook-hosted page that asks them to copy and paste some JavaScript code into their browser's address bar.
This is an old and rather primitive scam technique. The rogue code misuses the user's active session to grab their friends list and send them spam messages via Facebook chat.
"The tactics used are exactly the same as in many of the 'Profile Spy,' or 'See who views your profile' scams that do the rounds so often, in fact the offending JavaScript file in this instance even contains the line 'var eventdesc = ‘Hey everyone, \n\ fb now lets you see who viewed your profile! to enable this feature, go here! -' suggesting that this represents nothing more than a rebaited trap," notes Rik Ferguson, director of security research & communication at Trend Micro.
A second, more sophisticated, Osama death scam is using clickjacking and rogue wall messages to spread. Users are directed to a page asking them to solve a captcha-like test consisting of a simple math operation.
Trying to input the answer will result in the click being hijacked and used to post a spam message on people's walls without their authorization.
Users are advised to get their news and related footage only from trusted and widely used sources. Interacting in any way with Facebook or Facebook-looking pages in order to obtain news information is never a good idea.