14 DAY TRIAL // Scammers have started capitalizing on people's interest into yesterday's arrest of a British teenager allegedly associated with the notorious hacking outfit LulzSec.
Rogue messages posted on the social networking site yesterday read "The Creator of LulzSec arrested in London (PHOTO TAKEN BY THE POLICE) SEE THE PICTURE WITHOUT BLURRING, SHARE THIS PAGE AND LIKE IT !! http://bit.ly/[censored]"
The posts were accompanied by a blurred image appearing to show two police officers carrying the suspect away.
In addition, scammers linked to an article about the arrest on Sophos' Naked Security blog, a site that regularly exposes Facebook scams.
This was probably done in an attempt to exploit Naked Security's good standing among Facebook users and lend more credibility to the rogue messages.
Clicking on the advertised bit.ly link takes users to a Facebook page asking them to Share and Like it in order to see the uncensored picture. Doing so is obviously a bad idea and will to the scam being propagated further.
"Sharing and liking the page, followed by clicking on the link, lead me to third-party webpages that urged me to download a program called iLividSetupV1.exe that attempted to install a series of toolbars.
"Presumably whoever is behind this Facebook scam (and I doubt it is anyone connected with LulzSec) is earning commission the more people they convince to install the software," says Sophos senior technology consultant Graham Cluley.
Mr. Cluley also tracked down the original photo used in the scam and it appears to depict a Turkish hacker named Mert Ortac being arrested back in 2008.
People who believe they might have fallen victim to this attack should remove any spam messages posted on their wall and unlike the rogue page. This can be done by editing their profile settings, going to "Activities and Interests > Show other pages" and removing it from the list.