Popular social-networking website Facebook was hit by a third phishing attack in two weeks as website administrators were working to prevent the hackers from striking again.
The third attack, which occurred on May 21, involved a fake e-mail that appeared to be from Facebook administration and contained the subject line “Hello.” It contained an invitation to recipients to “Check areps.at” or “Check bests.at.”
Clicking on the links would take the users to a fake page that looks like the Facebook login page. From there the hackers would be able to steal the users’ login and passwords.
It is suspected that the hackers were the same ones launching a phishing attack against the site last week and earlier this week as the tactics used in all cases were very similar. The attackers used a compromised account to send a malicious link to all the user’s friends. The link led the friends to a phishing site disguised as the Facebook site asking the users for their username and password.
The hackers would then obtain this username and password, and use this compromised account to launch a new round of attacks against a second round of friends.
Facebook spokesperson Barry Schnitt was quoted in the BBC saying that Facebook was “blocking any [accounts] that had been compromised.” He did not comment on how many accounts were subject to the attack or how many had been compromised.
Facebook has been subject to attacks before, some more serious than others. Last year, a virus named “Koobface” used compromised accounts to send e-mails to users, asking them to download and install a trojan which gathers sensitive information from computers and takes over users’ browsers.
The third attack, which occurred on May 21, involved a fake e-mail that appeared to be from Facebook administration and contained the subject line “Hello.” It contained an invitation to recipients to “Check areps.at” or “Check bests.at.”
Clicking on the links would take the users to a fake page that looks like the Facebook login page. From there the hackers would be able to steal the users’ login and passwords.
It is suspected that the hackers were the same ones launching a phishing attack against the site last week and earlier this week as the tactics used in all cases were very similar. The attackers used a compromised account to send a malicious link to all the user’s friends. The link led the friends to a phishing site disguised as the Facebook site asking the users for their username and password.
The hackers would then obtain this username and password, and use this compromised account to launch a new round of attacks against a second round of friends.
Facebook spokesperson Barry Schnitt was quoted in the BBC saying that Facebook was “blocking any [accounts] that had been compromised.” He did not comment on how many accounts were subject to the attack or how many had been compromised.
Facebook has been subject to attacks before, some more serious than others. Last year, a virus named “Koobface” used compromised accounts to send e-mails to users, asking them to download and install a trojan which gathers sensitive information from computers and takes over users’ browsers.
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