Users of mobile phones are often unaware of the security risks they face every day. An infection by viruses or other malicious code seems to be a matter of computers, but not mobile phones. Being a victim of scams or other crimes on the Internet seems to only happen when you surf with your computer. The reality is very different. Accessing social networks from a mobile phone presents many dangers.
Proof of this is an analysis conducted by the company BitDefender a scam recently occurred in Facebook. The hook was to see the status of a girl who was expelled from school after making an entry on Facebook. This generated a massive wave of invitations, in which a quarter of the clicks generated came from mobile phones.
To view the status of the girl had to give permission to download an application, which was actually a worm for Facebook, capturing all the surfer profile and friends list. It also allowed the hook message to be posted on the victim's wall and on that of all the victim's friends, triggering a rapid spread. Not content with this, the cybercriminals who devised the scam asked the user to complete a test to verify they were human before the content was unlocked.
The test options had such compelling titles as "Are you stupid?" and "Is this your true love?" Clicking on either option meant giving money to cyber scammers, because they were disguised ads on malicious websites. According to BitDefender, there were about 29,000 clicks on malicious websites, of which 24 percent came from mobile devices. Analyzed by source website, 59 percent came from www.facebook.com and 20 percent from m.facebook.com. At this link, the BitDefender team explains all the details about this Facebook scam.
Other news about… Facebook, Malware, Security
