I’m not a fan of Spam – yeah who is?
I’m also very aware of phishing techniques and there’s a new one out there that’s catching people.
One of your friends on Facebook will group message a bunch of people with a link that seemingly goes to Facebook. It doesn’t. It’s a redirect to a phishing site that will do bad things to your computer, your Facebook Profile and worst of all your Facebook Friends (like me).
See how that link starts with http://facebook.com ? That’s all good and fine but it’s the 2nd part that has the bad JuJu.
Here’s a hint. A redirect is a flag. Make that a redirect with .js (javascript) or .php and it’s a red flag. And do you see the /wp-content/ part? I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that it’s a wordpress site that wasn’t properly maintained (It’s really easy to keep your site up to date) and some malicious hacker is now using it for evil!
Friends don’t let friends spam their friends – right?
When you have a message like this you have a few options
Do nothing – just let the message drift down the list- Leave the Conversation – it’ll be like it never happened
- Delete the Message –
- or Report as Spam
What you may not realize is that Facebook isn’t actively watching out for bad guys like this. Instead they rely on users to flag and alert them to bad content. When that happens a contractor, possibly in a 3rd world country, will make a snap decision and hopefully block the bad guy or site from doing this again. If it’s a big enough problem they’ll escalate it and put a team on it to block it via code. None of that happens if you ignore, delete or hide these things.
Start marking these things as Spam. It takes only a few seconds and makes Facebook a better place for us all.
Oh Yeah. If it’s your Profile that’s spamming your friends – go here: http://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=applications and delete every App. All of them. Now change your password, start signing in securely, apologize to all your friends – and buy me a beer! 🙂
He's an avid hockey fan, rides a mountain bike, sometimes rides a road bike, has a few motorcycles (he had a really fast one, bought a cool orange one, rode a really slow one, and now,a perfect "BDR Weapon"). If that isn't enough, he makes cheese and sourdough bread, loves strong beer and good red wine, and poorly plays the Mandolin.
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