Another Facebook photo scam
Photo tagging, like so much on Facebook, seemed like a cool idea at the time, but is now showing its ugly side as the practice results in increased malware and spam for users that participate in it.
The fellow who heads up Facecrooks, Tim Senft, has a warning for us all (again) and this time it has to do with photo tagging. As Senft’s latest article warns, the people that delight in bringing us malware and spam by way of Facebook specialize in going to yet another new security or privacy opening whenever the one before is closed. And it is clear that there is no shortage of problems for the hackers to take advantage of. This time it is the tagging of users in photographs uploaded to the site. The scam is worked in the same way that many previous Facebook exploits have been put together.
The scammers in question insert a huge number of users that supposedly are in the photo in question. This results in the users in question being sent an email by the site. The scammers are hoping, often successfully, that each user will go to the link included in the original posting, at which there will always be a phishing or scam site, or perhaps a bit of malware. The photo-tagging exploit is both simple and effective, especially since there is no way to completely turn off photo-tagging on Facebook. As usual, Zuckerberg and company are in no hurry to remove the processes which make this particular exploit possible.
Of course, no one should be surprised by any of this. Zuckerberg’s personal and corporate mission in life is to gain the rights to every bit of personal information about everyone who ever visits the Web, so that he may “legally” sell it to corporations that in turn want to sell us all any number of things. If problems do not interfere with this critical activity, Facebook sees little reason to do anything about it.
Let the user beware.
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