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Sunday, October 16, 2011

Facebook Phishing and prevention

It seems the facebook is no different from your email when you get what looks to be a trusted message from one of your friends only to find out it takes you to a site that has a built in program to infect your computer.

The classic one I saw not to long ago was one of one of my friends whos computer was compromised and for a while it was posting stuff like Look at this video of this woman showing her you know lol.

The problem is that if you think its coming from your friend and it does not sound like its something they normally post then I'm sure its a bad phishing posting.

Phishing if your not familiar with the term is a way a hacker trys to lure a computer user to click on a link or a graphic which then takes them to a site where it installs a program on the computer users browser. Usually a key logger which saves your password when you relog in and then post the same video over and over again.

Sometimes what it is used is to get traffic to a site or sometimes to collect personal information. So watch what you post on your profile if its too personal.

- Rules to follow if you feel like your account has been compromised.
- Change your password on facebook
- Make sure your email password and your facebook password are 2 different passwords. This will help reduce getting all your accounts compromised
- Make sure you have a good password. Alpha numeric, upper lower case letters helps
- Run a program called Malwarebytes (yes you have a virus program but most virus programs are not built to detect malware. Thats the ugly truth. - make sure you run this first before you change your passwords.

- if you have phishing postings on your wall make sure you take them off and tell people not to click anything that looks like this.