{"id":10092,"date":"2013-02-18T17:11:47","date_gmt":"2013-02-18T17:11:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/e-commerce\/scam_users_accumulate_facebook_likes_buy_a_ferrari.html"},"modified":"2022-10-14T18:43:00","modified_gmt":"2022-10-14T22:43:00","slug":"scam-users-accumulate-facebook-likes-buy-a-ferrari","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/e-commerce\/scam-users-accumulate-facebook-likes-buy-a-ferrari.html","title":{"rendered":"Scam Users, Accumulate Facebook Likes, Buy a Ferrari"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bitdefender Labs recently reported that a site showing kittens and unicorns suggested users download a “business flash” plugin in order to see a video. At this point the plugin takes control of the user’s computer allowing cookie information to be taken and replicated on another computer – effectively locking a user out of their social networking account.<\/p>\n

\"business-flash-player.png\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Bitdefender describes<\/a> the people behind this scheme as crooks which makes this story more interesting as this exploit seems to be designed to “borrow” a user’s identity. If your account isn’t taken over, the extension sits on your computer and can continue to like site after site without your approval.<\/p>\n

While identity theft laws likely come into play here, the interesting area of this scheme is ascertaining damages. After all, a bank account isn’t being cleaned out. You can imagine a judge saying ok, so this person installed software on your computer which made it appear as if you liked a site which you never heard of… Big deal!<\/p>\n

So what’s in it for the scammers? Bitdefender Labs discovered a recently created blank page with 40,000 likes due to this scheme. A site with 100,000 likes sells for<\/a> $150,000-$200,000 or slightly less than an entry-level Ferrari<\/a>. Not bad work if you can get it – moreover if this is really a grey area of hacking we can expect to see a lot more energy devoted to such exploits. I wonder if retweets on Twitter and repins on Pinterest are fertile areas for future scams.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bitdefender Labs recently reported that a site showing kittens and unicorns suggested users download a “business flash” plugin in order to see a video. At this point the plugin takes control of the user’s computer allowing cookie information to be taken and replicated on another computer – effectively locking a user out of their social<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,163,156,118],"tags":[],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10092"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10092"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10092\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19067,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10092\/revisions\/19067"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}