Categories: Social Media

Facebook ‘Dislike’ scam spreading fast

An increasing number of web security firms are warning Facebook users to be wary of a convincing viral scam on the social network which invites users to click a link to enable a new ‘dislike’ button on their profile.

Credit:Sophos

Once a user clicks the link the scam message will be posted on their friends’ walls, the user will also be taken to a page which asks them to copy a line of JavaScript into their browser’s address bar.  The code takes the user to a scam survey and could be used to run malicious code on their computer.

Graham Cluley from the U.S web security firm Sorphos first blogged about the scam today,having seen a significant rise in the number of affected accounts over the weekend.

The scam is designed to generate revenue for the perpetrators through the fake survey.

This scam copies Facebook’s genuine method of testing advanced features by allowing users to manually enable them.  For example, at the moment Facebook users can enable Facebook Questions on their account by visiting this link.  Without doing so the feature will not appear on their profile.

Facebook dislike button. Credit:Sophos

The scam can be identified by text similar such as “Facebook now has a dislike button! Click ‘Enable Dislike Button’ to turn on the new feature!” accompanied by a link to “Enable Dislike Button.”

The Managing Directory of the Irish IT Security company Threatscape, Dermot Williams, says social networking users should not “implicitly trust messages received from their social networking contacts” and advises users to be suspicious of unsolicited messages.

Mr Williams said, “[The scam] exploits users’ insatiable appetite to try out new features on their favourite sites… It tricks users into manually performing the actions required to propagate the scam.”

He goes on to advise social media users not to be lulled into a false sense of security online.

This scam is the latest in a series of similar spamvertising tricks used on Facebook in the past few months.  Most recently one successful scam duped users into clicking a link which claimed would show leaked video of Osama bin Laden’s death.

Source: SophosThreatscape

Ajit Jain

Ajit Jain is marketing and sales head at Octal Info Solution, a leading iPhone app development company and offering platform to hire Android app developers for your own app development project. He is available to connect on Google Plus, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Recent Posts

The ‘DARPAVERSE’ is coming to model, simulate & optimize military operations

DARPA is metaphorically manifesting Eris, the Greek goddess of discord and strife, by attempting to…

16 hours ago

Prezent AI on track to become to first enterprise business communication unicorn following $400m valuation

Since the moment powerful Large Language Models (LLMs) hit the market, the promise of GenAI…

1 day ago

Walking, talking humanoid robots are coming to society in 4-5 years: WEF

Humanoid robots will be walking and talking among us in the next four or five…

5 days ago

From viewers to co-creators: How AI is changing movie marketing

In recent years, fan engagement in sports has transformed from passive viewership into immersive participation.…

6 days ago

History repeats itself: how crypto is making the same mistakes the internet did in the ’90s

Back in 1990, the internet faced a major problem that we don’t regard as relevant…

6 days ago

Google’s Prem Ramaswami on why we’re still in the early days of large language models

Today, I’m talking to Prem Ramaswami, the Head of Data Commons at Google. Prem and his team recently…

6 days ago