Posts Tagged ‘Facebook features’

This g1rl must be Out of her Mind – Facebook scam spreading quickly

Published by pratyushkp on July 14th, 2011 - in Social, Technology

In a continuance of a trend we have been seeing the last few weeks, a new Facebook scam using a sexually suggestive thumbnail is spreading like wildfire.

The scam is currently spreading on people’s walls using the title “This g1rl must be Out of her Mind but also a Genious for making This v1deo! – After they took her life away she decided to do genious revenge!” and “This woman must be really nuts but also a Genious for making This video! – They decided to ruin her life but she decided to hit them back!”

Since Facebook implemented their partnership with Web of Trust back in March, it appears the con artists are changing their URLs more frequently to prevent WoT from detecting the threat and warning users.

In the past 90 minutes, I have seen this scam use youpube-dot-info, youmube-dot-info and www.grimvh-dot-info. These URLs will likely be dormant by the time you read this and replaced with another set pointing at identical scams.

If you click on the post you are presented with the “Verify you are human” or “Are you older than 13 years of age? Click ‘Jaa’ button 2x to confirm and play video” popup screens. This leads you to a Facebook share dialog in Finnish where clicking “Jaa” means Share.

If you click Jaa twice you are ultimately led to a survey where the fraudsters earn a commission for every user who succumbs to the temptation of seeing the sexy video.

Source :- http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com

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Smiley hats and free Vans scams flood Facebook

Published by pratyushkp on July 9th, 2011 - in Social, Technology

Hundreds of thousands of Facebook users have been fooled into believing that they will receive a hat with a large smiley face on it, and could potentially be putting themselves at risk of being scammed in the process.

Over 300,000 people so far have been tricked into liking a Facebook page, and sharing the link with their friends, in the dubious belief that they will be sent a free smiley hat to promote a firm’s new clothing line.

The message reads:

First 750,000 Get a Free Smiley Hat To Help Promote Our New Clothing Line.
?1 - Join The Page 2 - Click on the share button (bottom left hand side of the page) You must do this too get your FREE hat! 3 - Write on the wall what color you want ( White - Black - Red ) 4 - After roughly 6 hours, you will have an email sent to your facebook account for shipping information 5 - Enjoy your NEW hat! ** All Countries Can Get Their Hat **

Sure enough, if you follow the page’s instructions you will share it with your Facebook friends – thus helping the message to spread virally.

But do you really believe that you are going to be sent a smiley hat? And who is this un-named company that is planning to ask 750,000 people for their name and postal address? Is it possible they are planning to do anything else with that information if you hand it over to them?

And what – seriously – are the chances that they are going to spend the money shipping that many hats to people who don’t even know what brand it is that they are promoting.

It all sounds very strange to me – and there is clearly an opportunity for a scam. For instance, once the organisers of this page have created their fan club of 750,000 user they could send a message to all of them containing a malicious link or a pointer to a phishing site.

And take a look at this.

There has been another message spreading rapidly across Facebook, claiming that there are 200,000 free pairs of Vans shoes up for grabs – and it’s using a very similar message.

First 200,000 Get A Free Pair Of Vans To Help Promote Our New Range.
?1 - Join The Page 2 - Click on the share button (bottom left hand side of the page) You must do this too get your FREE Vans! 3 - Write on the wall what colour and size you want! 4 - 31 days after you join you will have an email sent to your facebook account for shipping information. Once again this will only happen if the page has been shared. ** All Countries Can Be Shipped To **

Hmm.. seems to me that the similar wording and modus operandi is far from a coincidence. And the Facebook pages have a very similar design – it’s just the bait which has been changed.

And if you dig around a little, you’ll find that Vans themselves have warned that the promotion is nothing to do with them.

Vans say that you will not get the shoes if the you like the Facebook page, and that the messages are entirely bogus. I strongly suspect that the smiley hat messages fall into the same category.

If you “Like” a page run by scammers, they can use it as a way to communicate with you – and potentially pass dangerous web links or attempt to steal personal information from you.

Don’t make it easy for the criminals on Facebook, and always think hard before believing every “sounds-too-good-to-be-true” offer on the social network.

Source :- http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com

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Facebook Is Taking A Special Interest In RockMelt’s Social Browser

Published by pratyushkp on June 16th, 2011 - in Social, Technology

Image via CrunchBase

Ever since RockMelt launched its social browser, it’s been known unofficially as the Facebook browser. Facebook chat, status updates and sharing are all built right into the browser. Now Facebook and RockMelt are officially working together in a product partnership, and the first fruits of that collaboration can be seen in the latest release available today, RockMelt 3.

RockMelt is still an independent browser with only a few hundred thousand active users. Facebook made no investment in RockMelt, nor is it going to help promote or distribute the browser, at least initially. Its product teams, however, are working closely with RockMelt to make sure that its Facebook features shine. “The partnership is based on a shared belief that social should join navigation and search as fundamental capabilities of the browser,” says RockMelt CEO Eric Vishria.

There are several new features in RockMelt 3. To start with, RockMelt 3 adds Moves your Facebook buddy list from the left edge to the right edge of the browser. The buddy list is now scrollable, and it can be expanded to view not just pictures of your friends’ faces, but their full names.

The second new feature is that Facebook notifications, messages, and friend requests—what Facebook engineers internally call “the jewels”—are now visible at the top of RockMelt right in the chrome itself. You can visually see when you have a new notification, friend request, or message, and pop down a window to read more.

RockMelt is now integrated with Facebook’s unified messaging system. So if a contact is online, a chat window pops open. If he or she is not, it reverts to Facebook messages.

RockMelt also knows when you are on Facebook.com, and strips away the redundant features from the site which are part of the browser. So the notification counters at the top pf Facebook disappear because they are now a feature of RockMelt. And when you are on Facebook.com, and a friend wants to chat, RockMelt’s version of Facebook chat opens up instead of two chat windows duplicating each other, which is what happened before.

So far, RockMelt has not taken off as much as its initial launch hype would have suggested. Since it opened up its beta to the public in March, it’s seen modest growth, but high user engagement. A Facebook endorsement could help its cause.

So did Marc Andreessen, who is both a Facebook and RockMelt board member, have anything to do with this partnership? Not initially. “Someone on Zuck’s staff was an alpha user—one of our first 100 users—he showed it to Zuck and that is what got the partnership going,” Vishria tells me.

Certainly, it is not too difficult to imagine why Facebook would be interested in supporting the development of a social browser.

Source :- http://techcrunch.com

Related articles
  • Facebook Is Taking A Special Interest In RockMelt’s Social Browser (techcrunch.com)
  • Facebook Collaborates With Social Browser RockMelt (mashable.com)
  • Facebook helps itself by helping RockMelt browser (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
  • RockMelt’s browser becomes even more social with a Facebook partnerhsip (venturebeat.com)
  • Facebook and RockMelt announce new partnership: Features like Facebook chat to be added to social browser (zdnet.com)
  • RockMelt and Facebook Partner on Social Web Browser (socialtimes.com)
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