Posts Tagged ‘youtube’

Hottest & Funniest Golf Course Video scam spreads virally on Facebook – beware!

May 20th, 2011

Image via CrunchBase

Another scam is spreading virally across Facebook, posing as a video in a scheme to make money for the confidence tricksters behind it.

The messages show what appears to be a thumbnail of a video showing a man standing closely behind a scantily clad woman to give her golfing advice.

The Hottest & Funniest Golf Course Video - LOL
[LINK]
Watch the Hottest & Funniest Golf Course Video Don\

Another version of the scam uses football rather than golf as the lure:

The Most Funniest & Hottest Footbal Video - Must Watch!
[LINK]
Watch the Funniest & Hottest Footbal Video - Must Watch!

The links in the messages we have seen so far have pointed to a webpage at blogspot.com, although this could – of course – be changed by the scammers in future variations.

If you make the mistake of clicking on the link in the hope that you might see a funny saucy video you will find that you have fallen straight into the scammers’ trap – as your Facebook page has been updated to say that you also “Like” the page, thus sharing it virally with all of your friends.

You will also be encouraged to complete an online survey for “verification” purposes, which in reality only earns commission for the bad guys who kicked off the money-making scheme in the first place.

Unfortunately, when I tested the scam I found no evidence that Facebook’snewly introduced security measures to intercept scams and warn of dangerous links had been effective.

How to clean-up the scam from your Facebook page

If you have been unfortunate enough to have been hit by this scam, here’s how you clean-up.

However, your mouse above the offending entry on your Facebook page and you should see an “X” appear in the top right hand corner of the post. You should now be able to mark the post as spam (which will remove it from your page).

Unfortunately, this hasn’t also removed the page from the list of pages you like, so you will need to edit your profile to manually remove it. You should find it listed under “Activities and Interests”.

Be sure to remove any other pages you don’t recognise in that list also.

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

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Mark Zuckerberg Isn’t the Role Model, Reid Hoffman Is.

May 19th, 2011

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Post from techcrunch written by Sarah Lacy

Forty-plus weeks traveling the emerging world has taught me many things. Chief among them is that most entrepreneurs outside Silicon Valley learn the wrong lessons looking in.

A lot of that is the fault of publications like TechCrunch: We get excited about new things. If it’s exploding like Groupon, all the better. But we even go nuts over things like Foursquare or Quora that have pretty muted user-bases. That’s what being evangelists and early adopters is all about. We tend not to write about all the apps that launch and go nowhere, with good reason: If we’re doing our job well, we probably thought they sucked to begin with.

But the bigger disservice we do is not writing enough about the boring companies who work every day to build something that becomes huge, giving the impression that starting a business is easy in the Valley. That somehow people wake up with an idea, and roll out of bed onto a pile of venture capital, press and adoration. A lot of times the companies we should be writing about more than we do are admittedly boring infrastructure or enterprise software names. But there’s a category of consumer names that should be sexy, but for whatever reason don’t get the hype.

I’ve always thought of Yelp in this category. Local plays like Foursquare and Groupon have always gotten more attention. Another one is Pandora. Spotify has gotten far more attention, despite Pandora pulling off what almost no other music startup has– surviving the full-barrel onslaught of the record labels. But the king of them all for the Web 2.0 crowd is LinkedIn.

You could understand if LinkedIn was just paling next to Facebook. I mean, who doesn’t? Facebook is one of those once-a-decade phenomenons. But LinkedIn started out as the less-sexy social network next to Friendster. And then it graduated to the also-ran next to MySpace. It has officially trounced both now that its IPO has priced at $45 a share, or $4 billion-plus valuation– the highest valuation for an Internet company debut since Google.

More than ten years ago, Reid Hoffman– LinkedIn’s founder– was one of the first people to believe in the comeback of the consumer Internet, investing in a host of startups, but putting the bulk of his money, personal brand, time and firepower behind LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is one of the only social networks that survived from the first social media frenzy. That’s quite an accomplishment when you think about it. Hoffman wasn’t exactly up against entrepreneurial slouches. All the big Valley venture capital guns were behind Friendster. Mark centerfold-of-Vanity-Fair-this-month Pincus was behind Tribe. And Sean You-Know-What’s-Cool? Parker was behind Plaxo.

One of the reasons LinkedIn outlasted that early generation of social networks was that it was boring and practical. In the early days of social networking, the only reason anyone could think to use these sites was for dating. But Hoffman knew that would always be a customer acquisition headache: Either a dating site solves your problem and you stop using it, or it doesn’t and you stop using it. LinkedIn on the other hand would be this thing in the background you would need your entire career.

You could argue the flaw with LinkedIn was the rational strategy that saved it worked too well. For many people, it became an indispensable tool for certain moments of professional panic, but not something you used daily or even monthly. I’ve always compared it to a AAA card, a comparison that visibly annoys Hoffman and usually results in suggestions of other ways I should be using it. But back in 2007, even he admitted the site’s biggest flaw was they weren’t giving people enough to do.

When the Web 2.0 craze took off in 2006 or so, Hoffman’s star soared, but shockingly it wasn’t really because of LinkedIn. It was his angel portfolio that got the bulk of media attention. That includes out-performers like Facebook, but also stars that shined bright and burned out like Digg and Six Apart. Ever the gracious interviewee, Hoffman would answer questions about the sexier companies, but always be sure to work in a LinkedIn plug. A favorite was regularly betting me an expensive dinner at the restaurant of my choice if LinkedIn couldn’t help me do a certain aspect of my job as a reporter better.

Hoffman wasn’t in his early twenties or a college dropout, and he’d be the first to admit he wasn’t a natural CEO. He’s said in previous interviews that he has a hard time firing people quickly enough– a skill that Mark Zuckerberg has excelled at. He’s left the CEO chair several times, only to come back when other candidates haven’t worked out. But even though he could easily throw out that old cop-out of “I’m just the guy who starts stuff; I’m not the CEO type” and wash his hands of the company, Hoffman cared about LinkedIn too much to ever be very far even when insanely sexier jobs were his for the taking. Even now in his role at Greylock, he spends the bulk of his time working on LinkedIn.

And yet, given all this, it’s LinkedIn that is the first social network to go public, the first multi-billion Web 2.0 IPO. It’s more than double the exit of sexy YouTube. And, in a rare case of startup justice, his day-in, day-out work building the social network no one ever wanted to get excited about has paid him handsomely: Netting him a boost of nearly $1 billion to his net worth. Few entrepreneurs who’ve spent a decade building a company get that kind of personal return, because few personally invest so much of their own cash along the journey.

Hoffman can’t comment on any of this of course. I haven’t talked to him in weeks. These are all my observations after ten years of interviewing him about LinkedIn, watching him shake his head at the unfairness of the hype cycle and keep slogging away at building LinkedIn regardless. Hoffman should be the role model for entrepreneurs star-struck by the seeming glamour and ease of Silicon Valley’s consumer Internet world. He’s the living incarnation of the reality of the Valley: It may be easier than ever to start a product, but building a company is just as hard as its ever been.

As for the brain-dead commentators wondering if LinkedIn’s IPO represents a bubble, somewhere Hoffman has to be laughing and shaking his head again. What part of spending a decade of building a business with more than 100 million users that no one hyped, that represents one of the few large-scale working examples of a freemium business model screams “BUBBLE” to you people? These are the same people that said Google was wildly overvalued when it priced at under $100 a share.

As most people with common sense have argued, we’re not in an Internet bubble now, because the soaring valuations are mostly contained within the frothy insider ecosystem. Secondary markets are starting to change that, but so far, there are exactly two $1 billion + Web 2.0 exits that I can count: YouTube and LinkedIn. Maybe you count a few more. It depends on your definition of “Web 2.0.” I count it as the wave of consumer Web social media companies started with the Friendster explosion. Some could count Skype (twice,) but I’d argue Skype is more of a sandwich generation company. But even if your definition is more generous, I bet you can count them on one hand. Five or fewer isn’t a bubble.

There’s exactly one aspect of Silicon Valley right now that I will concede does feel like 1999: It’s easy to start a company. Stupidly easy. And entrepreneurs like Hoffman are the antithesis of that archetype not a symptom of it.

Source:- http://techcrunch.com

  • Attn Entrepreneurs: Mark Zuckerberg Isn’t the Role Model. Reid Hoffman Is. (techcrunch.com)
  • LinkedIn boss poised for $600m payout from sale of shares (guardian.co.uk)
  • LinkedIn Founder Could Net $855 Million in Thursday’s IPO (mashable.com)
  • You: LinkedIn set for $350 million IPO – CNN (news.google.com)
  • LinkedIn Raises $352.8 Million in Initial Public Offering (businessweek.com)
  • Today, LinkedIn’s IPO is tipped to set off at a staggering $4.3 billion! (dominicatimes.wordpress.com)
  • LinkedIn Hikes IPO Price Range (online.wsj.com)
  • “LinkedIn on Tuesday raised the expected price range of its IPO by 30 percent to $42 to $45 per share from $32 to $35.” and related posts (rocketnews.com)
  • LinkedIn IPO Prices Value Company at Over $4 Billion (webpronews.com)
  • Infographic: A Look At LinkedIn On Its 8th Birthday (paidcontent.org)
  • LinkedIn’s IPO: A proxy for an eventual Facebook IPO (zdnet.com)
  • LinkedIn IPO likely a success, but risks real (business.financialpost.com)
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Osama bin Laden leaked video scam rises again on Facebook

May 18th, 2011

Image via CrunchBase

A new version of the various Facebook scams we have seen since the death of Osama bin Laden has emerged.

Naked Security reader Sampath sent us a tip-off about the latest variation he had seen of a viral scam that poses as a video of the killing of Osama bin Laden:

OSAMA KILLING REAL VIDEO LEAKED
OMG! real video of Osama Bin Laden being killed. Video leaked by wikileaks. Watch it before it get deleted.

A link in the message may, at first glance, appear to point to the YouTube website but in fact points to a similar-looking Indian domain name ending in “.in”.

If you make the mistake of clicking on the link you are taken to a third-party webpage, which poses as a security verification check from YouTube.

Quite why anyone would imagine that typing in the words “real video” is any form of security verification is beyond me.

But what’s happening here is that when you submit the so-called CAPTCHA text you are unwittingly publishing the message to your own Facebook wall. This spreads the message virally to your Facebook friends, and helps spread the scam further on behalf of the bad guys.

The scammers make their money by tricking you into taking an online survey. They earn commission for each person they managed to complete it, and you might be the sort of person who is tempted to answer the questionnaire in the belief that you’ll get to see a video of the Osama bin Laden being killed.

Remember – the real YouTube would never ask you to complete an online survey before watching a video, and that scams like this are rife across Facebook. As long as Facebook users keep falling for scams like this, they’ll carry on being a problem.

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

  • Osama bin Laden leaked video scam rises again on Facebook (nakedsecurity.sophos.com)
  • Osama bin Laden scams on Facebook (securitybloggersnetwork.com)
  • Martin Short Sings a Tribute to the Killing of Osama Bin Laden (VIDEO) (tvsquad.com)
  • Osama Bin Laden and Computer Security (netlz1.wordpress.com)
  • Video Released of Osama Bin Laden Being Thrown Into The Sea From The Helicopter (socyberty.com)
  • What Osama bin Laden is forced to wear in hell (offthebench.nbcsports.com)
  • Osama Had A Facebook Page! (ramanan50.wordpress.com)
  • Osama bin Laden’s ghost (search.japantimes.co.jp)
  • WARNING: Fotos_Osama_Bin_Laden.exe Email Attachment Is A Banking Trojan (techie-buzz.com)
  • U.S.-leaked Osama bin Laden video proves he was apparently… (shortformblog.tumblr.com)
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Why are you tagged in this video? It’s a viral Facebook scam , Please Avoid

May 17th, 2011
Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...

Image via CrunchBase

Facebook users have been hit by another fast-spreading scam today, pretending to be a link to a YouTube video that they have been tagged in.

Facebook video scam

The scam messages use potential victims’ first names, claiming that they have been tagged in the “Youtube” video.

Phrases used in the attack include:

YO [name] why are you tagged in this video

WTF!! [name] why are you tagged in this video

hey [name] i cant believe youre tagged in this video

hey [name] you look so stupid in this video

omg! [name] why are you tagged in this vid

OMG [name] why are you in this video

Each “video” has a random number of views and likes, but the length of the movie always appears to be 2:34. Eagle-eyed Facebook users might realise something is awry when they see that the links refer to “Youtube” rather than the rather more accurate “YouTube”.

But if you do make the mistake of clicking on the video thumbnail you will be taken to a webpage which tries to trick you into cutting-and-pasting a malicious JavaScript code into your browser’s address bar (this appears to be one of the scammers’ favourite methods of attack at the moment).

You have to concede, it’s a cunning piece of social engineering by the bad guys. Wouldn’t you want to see a video that your Facebook friends say you have been tagged in?

If you’re a regular user of Facebook, make sure you join the Sophos page on Facebook to be kept informed of the latest security threats.

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

  • Why are you tagged in this video? It’s a viral Facebook scam (nakedsecurity.sophos.com)
  • I Can’t Believe You Are In This Video Facebook Scam Spreading (techie-buzz.com)
  • DAD CATCHES DAUGHTER ON WEBCAM – Beware Facebook Viral Scam! (itinfoguide.wordpress.com)
  • Dad catches daughters on webcam: Beware viral Facebook video link (pratyushkp.wordpress.com)
  • OMG Look What This Kid Did To His School Facebook Scam Spreading (techie-buzz.com)
  • Viral Scam Link Hits Facebook – Dad catches daughters on Web Cam (secboyuk.wordpress.com)
  • Dislike Button Scam Spreads Then Disappears (allfacebook.com)
  • “I can’t believe you’re in this vid” And “Why are you tagged in this video” Spam On Facebook: Reported And Shown In Action (pulkit.me)
  • ‘Enable Dislike Button’ scam spreading on Facebook (zdnet.com)
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Lord Gaga video banned? Twitter rogue app spread by scammers

May 5th, 2011
Lady GaGa

Image by ama_lia via Flickr

Scammers are seeding an attack against Twitter users, posing as a banned video of “Lord Gaga” in an attempt to compromise accounts.

Using a selection of newly created Twitter accounts, which have the names and avatars of young women, the tweeted-out messages all look similar:

#pssst Lord Gaga VIDEO BANNED -----> [LINK] #onethingiveneverdone #cnn

Lord Gaga banned video tweets

The mention of “Lord Gaga” refers to a running-joke on Twitter today, about what would happen if Harry Potter villain Lord Voldermort and Lady Gaga hooked up. The hashtags, which can vary, appear to be taken from Twitter’s trending topics in an attempt to reach a wider audience.

Interestingly, in the above screenshot all of the Twitter profiles used to seed the scam campaign have adopted the names of women beginning with the letter “B”: Bianca, Berenice, Betania, and so forth..

It has been no surprise while writing this article to find that the scammers have now run out of “B” names and have moved onto female names beginning with the letter “C”..

These aren’t your usual Twitter profiles, and as can be seen in the example below, appear to be newly created specifically for the purposes of spreading the link.

Twitter attack seeder

What makes the profiles even more suspicious is that the only messages they have tweeted out so far have all been to the same place – a fake YouTube site, which pretends to host the banned video.

Lord Gaga video

Twitter’s security team would be wise to shut down the bogus profiles as soon as possible, before the attack spreads further because rather than playing a music video, clicking on the player will attempt to trick users into giving a rogue application the rights to access their Twitter account.

Would you authorise this Twitter app?

An app called “money works new” hardly sounds like it would be connected to a music video, and you would be wise not to give it access to your account. But, as we’ve seen in the past, Twitter users can be tricked by such an attack into making poor decisions.

Indeed, even Lady Gaga herself appears to have recently fallen foul of such a scam on Twitter.

If you do make the mistake of authorizing the app, the scammers won’t waste any time posting the same message from your account – hoping to entrap more victims.

Rogue app victim on Twitter

If you were unfortunate enough to grant a rogue applications access to your Twitter account, revoke its rights immediately by going to the Twitter website and visiting Settings/Connections and revoking the offending app’s rights.

Revoke app on Twitter

Don’t make it easy for scammers to make money in this way, and always exercise caution about which third party apps you allow to connect with your social networking accounts.

If you’re on Twitter and want to learn more about threats, be sure to follow Naked Security’s team of writers.

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

  • Banned Lady Gaga video attack spreads on Twitter via rogue app (pratyushkp.wordpress.com)
  • Unfollowed Me rogue application spreads virally on Twitter (pratyushkp.wordpress.com)
  • Rogue apps invade Twitter [Mike "Winfreight" Shraga] (ecademy.com)
  • Profile Spy rogue application spreads virally on Twitter (nakedsecurity.sophos.com)
  • Lady Gaga Will Debut “Judas” Music Video On May 5 [Video Still] (inquisitr.com)
  • 6 Ways to Get More Twitter Followers (blogs.constantcontact.com)
  • Your Online Timer survey scam spreads rapidly on Twitter (nakedsecurity.sophos.com)
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