Contributed by: Editor on Friday, May 15 2009 @ 09:44 am
Last modified on
On Thursday, an unknown number of the over 200 million Facebook users, gave up their passwords to hackers in an email phishing scheme. Hackers initially cracked passwords of a number of Facebook accounts and then, using these accounts, sent emails to the account holders Facebook friends telling them to visit the website. The link in the email actually sent them to another website which was made to look like Facebook. When the friends logged in, they unwittingly gave up their real Facebook username and password. It is thought that the attack was designed to spread SPAM and steal identities. The affected Facebook accounts have now been closed. Apparently Facebook faced a similar attack 2 weeks ago.
Last year a similar attack type of phishing attack happened to Facebook and MySpace users. The difference that time was a virus called Koobface, which users unwittingly downloaded, was used to generate a fake email.
Last month Match.com members faced a similar phishing expedition by hackers when they were sent emails that looked like they came from Match (see Story). The email asked them to log into a fake website to view pictures and a video which required a special video player. This video player was actually a virus.
For the full story, read Reuters[*1] .