The new extension will make sure you don't fall victim to spammers

Sep 27, 2011 15:08 GMT  ·  By

Facebook scams represent a real threat because of the fact that Like buttons and other widgets are all over webpages. The new tool will instantly alert the customer if something's fishy.

Likejacking is used by hackers to fool social media network members into sharing and spreading spam and other malicious content.

As a form of Clickjacking, it's considered to be a social engineering attack in which victims are duped into clicking malevolent hidden links contained in a page.

The new plug-in is available for three of the most commonly utilized browsers, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Apple's Safari so most Facebook enthusiasts can benefit from its purpose.

The first feature offered by the extension is the fact that it immediately informs you if Facebook widgets are present on the current web location and if they are hidden or not. Then, if the element is detected as being malicious you are warned about the threats.

So how does it work?

After installing the Likejacking prevention tool, a small symbol will appear in the right corner of the address bar. To make the whole thing as least annoying as possible the guys at Zscaler made it so when a site contains potentially threatening content, the icon turns red, otherwise it's green.

If no FB content is found on the domain, the symbol won't show at all.

By clicking on it, you can get information on how many widgets exist on the certain location and you can highlight them by clicking the corresponding button.

In case a false positive is detected, you can easily submit the page to the developers and let them know about the error.

You can also configure the utility to your own liking, so if you suffer from paranoia, you can set the extension to alert you each time you click a Facebook component or you can customize it to delete the widgets all together.

There is also a 'whitelist' where you can list the domains considered to be totally and permanently secure, such as Yahoo, Google (these are set by default) or Softpedia.

Zscaler Likejacking Prevention plug-in for Mozilla Firefox is available for download here