Sophos Cloud Optix
It’s yet another weekend of fast-spreading scams on Facebook, with this time the promise of a leaked video of Casey Anthony confessing to her lawyer.
BREAKING NEWS - Leaked Video of Casey Anthony CONFESSING to Lawyer!
[LINK]
Click To See - She can't be re-tried, double jeopordy.. OJ all over again!
Casey Anthony was found not guilty earlier this month of murdering her two year old daughter, in a case which has gripped America.
With such huge media interest in the case and its outcome, scammers have leapt upon the opportunity to take advantage for their own financial ends.
If you make the mistake of clicking on the links spreading across Facebook, you will be taken to an all-too-familiar sight:
“Jaa”, as regular readers of Naked Security know, is Finnish for “Share”. The scammers want you to help them spread the link far and wide by getting you to Share it with your Facebook friends and family.
Remember – you’re being asked to do this before you see any video. If one of your Facebook friends see that you have shared the link via your newsfeed, they might believe that you are endorsing the claim that this is a video of Casey Anthony confessing to her lawyer – and click on it themselves.
Because you’ll ultimately be taken to a page which pretends to be YouTube, but is really designed to trick you into taking a survey that earns commission for the scammers.
In other words, the more traffic they bring to the survey page – by tricking you into sharing it – the more money they could make.
It goes without saying, of course, that the scammers do not have a video of Casey Anthony confessing to her lawyer. Ultimately they point you to a TV news report of Casey Anthony being told she is not guilty of murder.
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) and check your profile does not have any unwanted “Likes” under your “Likes and interests”.
If you use Facebook and want to get an early warning about the latest attacks, you should join the Sophos Facebook page where we have a thriving community of over 100,000 people.
I tried to send this link to a twitter follower, who would not open for two reasons in the URL: (1) naked and (2) Casey Anthony. Are others missing out on good information for fear of something really bad will happen?
I've told you people in the past… You are writing way too many blog posts about Facebook scams… Today I decided to calculate it. Here are the results:
http://securitee.org/img/gcluley_posts.png
For 2011, 1 in 2 FB posts are about scams and 1 in 3 of ALL of your posts are about facebook… compare it with the previous years… Posts about FB scams stopped being news after the 2nd time….
Nice graph – you clearly went to some effort.
But clearly these Facebook scam stories are news for *many* people as hundreds of thousands of users continue to fall for them. 🙁 If you look at our "most popular" widget on the side of the screen you'll find that they're frequently some of our most popular content too. So we must be doing something right..
We clearly mark the posts which are about Facebook both in the title and in the tags for the post, so I'm not quite sure what the problem is for you. Are you finding them somehow difficult to avoid?
Hi Graham,
No I am not finding them difficult to avoid. My problem is that when you spend so much time writing over and over about Facebook scams, you can miss other, more novel content. That is why I made a graph of the last 4 years… to show how your blogging has changed from 26/530 FB stories in 2009 (5%) to 102/316 in 2011 (32%). Sure, you may be popular…but the question is to whom?
P.S. In case you want to run your own set of queries, you can find the gathered data here: http://securitee.org/files/cluley_bposts.txt
So, you seem to be just looking at the articles I have written rather than those of my colleagues too..
We all have our specialities – one of mine is social networking threats. I think it would be fairer if you compared Naked Security's total content rather than just one of its contributors.
I'm sure there will still be lots of Facebook-related articles of course – but that's because cybercrime on Facebook has exploded in the last couple of years.
That's not to say that we're complacent, however. We're hoping to expand the number of people who write material for us in the future. Thanks again, for your efforts and research.
By the way, so far this article has been shared over 10,000 times.
So clearly there are folks who *are* interested in it, even if it's not your cup of tea!
If I might leap to the defence of my friend and colleague Graham just a little here – your graph is rather dubious, inasmuch as you have drawn the current year (which is half over) as if it were a full year. From this you have drawn two conclusions.
Firstly, you conclude that GC now writes a greater _percentage_ of articles about Facebook than before. This is true. Secondly, you conclude that GC is, as a result, missing "other, more novel content". But if you extrapolate to the end of the year, to make the graph visually honest, GC will have written _many more articles altogether_ than in the full years on your graph, and thus will have covered more issues altogether, including more articles on non-Facebook stuff, his interest in social networking stories notwithstanding.
Note also that since 2009/2010, when GC was a "solo" general-purpose blogger, the Naked Security site was formed. So he doesn't need to be quite so general-purpose any more. He has a bunch of other, ahhhhh, talented and well-informed writers to round out his contributions now 🙂
I think we all get your point. But we also notice that Facebook scams are a big deal (much bigger than they were in 2008 and 2009), and that we'd like to help Facebook users to avoid them, and to provide some advice for sysadmins and IT helpdesk guys to pass on or to use when they're crafting and adapting their social networking stance at work…
Paul the graph is as visually honest as it gets… I am plotting the number of available posts to date (I have even included the date of my measurements for reproduction and I have provided a link to the gathered data). If I "extrapolate" as you say, you will still be writing 32% FB articles… I am actually honestly interested in the way that you would graph the data… Can you share your methodology?
Also, the reason why I plotted G.Cluley's posts is because he is by far the most active blogger of the site. I know your arguments about FB and the increasing risks… I've heard them before. The fact is that 9/10 scams work in exactly the same way (funny/sassy/sad video – Click here – Fill quiz – Share with friends)… My point is that if you are a "security news and research blog" you would write about them when something new came about… not on every instantiation of them. In the same spirit, one could make a blog where he would talk about each and every SPAM message that he ever received, instead of splitting them up into categories and describing each one, once.
The sentence:
" ..and check your profile has not any unwanted "Likes" under your "Likes and interests".
does not make sense. Maybe it should be: ".. and check that your profile does not have any…", but that's just a guess.
Thanks. My silly typo. Now fixed I hope.