The dangers of Facebook fraudsters

2009-09-21

There have been a number of concerns raised of the safety of social networking sites and now an online service has been identified claiming to be able to hack any Facebook account for $100 (£61.58).

PandaLabs' Luis Corrons reported on the site, noting that he originally thought it was simply a scam. He tested out the legitimacy of the website's claim by creating a temporary Facebook account. Mr Corrons was given the option to enter this ID and clicking on a 'Hack it' button, which gave him the owner of the Facebook account as well as the chance to 'Start Facebook hacking'.

He clicked on the save button but as he had not paid was unable to view the passwords. The payment is via Western Union and the money is to be sent to Ukraine.

"Once you send the information, you are told that it will appear in your balance. Of course it won't, as this is all about taking the money from users. And at the end, as the user wanted to hack an account, he won't call the police," commented Mr Corrons.

PandaLabs found out that the Facebook hacking website has been registered by someone from Moscow, he added.

Despite this, companies and individuals looking to avoid a data breach or an IT intrusion may be concerned by the security of such social networking sites. In the recent Websense Security Labs' the State of Internet Security, Q1 - Q2, 2009 report, it was noted that the Koobface attack and other rogue applications have been created to gain access to Facebook users' login details.

The research also found that over 200,000 phony copycat sites have been created by fraudsters, all featuring the terms Facebook, MySpace or Twitter in their URLs. Websense gave the examples of buy.viagra.twitter.fakedomain1234.com and hotbabesofmyspace999.com. More than 150,000 known fake URLs were found to contain the term Facebook over the research period.

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