Facebook has never been ignored by hackers and information stealers since it is a massive platform with lot of active users. Anything that attracts an eye of the facebook user doesnt take much time to go viral and spread across the network. We have seen the free iPhone scam, mcDonalds scam, samsung galaxy s3 scam and so many more! Two more dangerous viral links have been noticed on the network and it is about time to warn my dear readers.

The facebook photo virus!

While browsing your facebook news feed like any usual day, suddenly your chat box pops up and it is one of your friends, and he is talking about a photo and his message contains a link. You get curious as to what the link contains since it is from one of your friends! Without even suspecting anything fishy, you click on the link and there you go. An image has been downloaded on your computer without your knowledge.

Whats behind an image? Images don’t contain viruses right?

Well, anyone having some knowledge about how stenography works, will know that you can hide any information behind an image and with advanced packaging techniques you can make an image execute the hidden file. That is exactly what the ‘facebook photo virus’ does.

Once the victim clicks on the image, he gets linked to a mediafire link containing a direct link to an image. In order to load the image, the browser requests mediafire server to send over the image. The image gets downloaded in your temporary folder so that you can view it.

Some advanced techniques used by hackers will cause that hidden file behind the image to execute.

The hidden file will hijack your facebook, gmail and all other social media accounts and send the mediafire link to all other contacts in your social media accounts. Your friends may or may not react the same way as you did, they will click the link, thinking that you sent it personally. This is how this virus spreads.

The message that you get might look something like this:

How much does your lover loves you?

How much your lover loves you? – SPAMMY APP

Everyone of us might have a crush or a lover and many of us are curious as to how much does our partner or the crush loves us or likes us! The hackers are attacking such vulnerable facebook users by spreading a link which will “calculate” how much your lover loves you!

As we have previously mentioned in lot of our posts, any of the facebook apps which ask us to post the link in facebook groups and pages is definitely a scam and there is no question of even proceeding to post that link anywhere.

Another way to detect such spammy apps is to look closely if they ask permission to post content on your facebook news feed! Check out this example here.

A facebook app asking permission to access all your information

As you can clearly see in the example above, the facebook app asks your public profile, friend list, email addresses of your friends and all the groups that you have membership in!

Letting this application access all your personal information IS A VERY SERIOUS THING TO BEWARE OF!

This little facebook app takes advantage of the human’s vulnerable thoughts and steals our personal information.

What can happen if you use the ‘How much does your lover loves you?’  app?

1. The personal information can easily be accessed by hackers.

2. Your information can and WILL be sold to corporate companies which WILL call you on your cellphones and send you unwanted emails and postage at your HOME! Some time or the other you give up your information just like this, and then you start getting calls. You then question, ‘how did this guy got my phone number?’. Well, now you have the answer, this is how the call centers get your phone numbers and personal information.

3. Your personal information can be used by hackers to create fake profiles, access passwords, tamper your bank details and conduct fraudulent activities which are you NEVER EVEN AWARE OF. Such activities don’t always come to the surface and the victim can hardly come to know how his information is being handled.

4. Victim’s personal information can be handed over to terrorists and organized criminal gangs to terrorize you and your family at any given time.

5. The offender can spy on you while you are online as well as while you are offline if he desires to.

Now it is your wish on how and where to give away your personal information.

On a side note  your partner’s love cannot be calculated by a computer which has no emotions. If you have a crush, go talk to your crush instead of trying to calculate love on facebook.

Learn more from BPI Digital Media Group.