14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook scammers are combining old techniques in new campaigns spotted on the social networking website, including clickjacking and registering rogue app pages.
After a period of paste-this-code-type scams and fake pages hosted on external servers, affiliate marketing spammers are back to their old tricks, security researchers from F-Secure warn.
A new scam currently spreading on the social network is generating messages that read "This girl killed herself after her dad posted a secret of her on her fb wall."
The included links appear to lead to pages on apps.facebook.com, however, they are used only as redirectors. When users click on the links they actually end up on .tk sites created particularly for this campaign.
According to the F-Secure experts, the use of Facebook application pages helps scammers in several ways. On one hand, they don't have to maintain many external resources, and on the other, these links are not blacklisted by Facebook's automated anti-spam systems.
The social networking site has recently partnered with Web of Trust to automatically block malicious URLs and already used other detection technologies from various vendors.
The .tk websites display a play button which is supposed to take users to the story, but in reality is part of a clickjacking attack. Regardless of what part of the page they click on, users will unknowingly like and share the page in the background.
They will then be redirected to other pages hosted on apps.facebook.com which are used for monetizing. They ask users to participate in one of several "surveys" before allowing them to see the alleged content.
In the background one can read "OMG.. SHOCKING!!! … this is the dad post" and under it "Emma suicide Letter." Of course, there is no real content and it's all a lure to get users to sign up for affiliate marketing offers that earn the scammers commissions.
If you have fallen victim to this scam, make sure to unlike the rogue pages and remove all spam messages posted on your wall. In the future avoid any kind of story that makes you jump through hoops in order to grant you access to content.