14 DAY TRIAL // The death of a British pilot during a RAF Red Arrows aerobatic display is being exploited in a new survey scam on Facebook.
Flt Lt Jon Egging, 33, died this past weekend when his Hawk T1 aircraft crashed while returning to base shortly after an RAF Red Arrows display.
The Red Arrows is the world-renowned aerobatic display team of the British Royal Air Force. Egging's death is the sixth in the team's 47-year history, and the first since 1988.
As usual, cyber crooks don't hold back from exploiting tragedies for their own personal gain and security researchers from Sophos have already spotted a Facebook scam using the accident as lure.
The spam messages promote a video of the plane crash, but instead lead users to a clickjacking page that displays a fake video player.
Clicking anywhere on the player thumbnail forces users to like the page without their approval. Such attacks abuse legitimate web programming techniques to hide page elements and hijack clicks.
Victims are then asked to Share a spam message with their friends and participate in a survey in order to be given access to the fake video.
These surveys earn scammers commission money and can result in costs for the victims which get silently subscribed to premium SMS services.
"If you got hit by this scam, make sure you have removed the entries from your news feed (to stop them being shared amongst your friends), marking them as spam if you like, and check your profile does not have any unwanted 'Likes' under your 'Likes and interests'," the Sophos security experts advise.
Facebook users have been regularly targeted in survey scams for the past several years and despite considerable efforts made by the company to stop them, there are still campaigns running on the social networking site at any given time.