Report: Mysterious Facebook Web Search Box Could Be Malware

A Web search box some users are seeing on their Facebook interface wasn't inserted by Facebook and could be the result of malware or a rogue browser plug-in or application.

AllFacebook, a blog devoted to Facebook-related news, first reported that a second search box had begun to appear on Facebook interfaces, right next to the legitimate site search bar.

The mysterious Web search box appeared perfectly integrated into the Facebook page layout, as if it were a native Facebook feature. However, Facebook is now saying that it didn't put that second search box there and that it could be a sign of malware infection.

"We are not testing the placement of a separate web search field and have no plans to do so. We believe the second search field or 'Search the Web" box appeared on peoples' accounts as the result of unknown actions by a third party targeting the browser -- potentially a browser plugin or malware -- unrelated to Facebook," a Facebook official told technology news blog Search Engine Land.

As Facebook members, users who think they might be affected by this situation have access to a free, browser-based virus scanning tool from McAfee, according to the company.

As the most popular social network and one of the world's largest sites, Facebook is in a constant battle against malicious hackers and online scammers who want to take advantage of its massive user base to commit fraud and spread malware.

At this point, it's not clear whether the sinister search box is the result of an external malware exploit or the work of a rogue Facebook application.

Facebook users warned of 'likejacking' scam

Internet security firm Sophos has warned Facebook users to be on the alert for a scam which sends a spam message to all of their friends on the social network.

Sophos, in a pair of blog posts late Monday, said "hundreds of thousands" of Facebook users have fallen for the scam which it dubbed "likejacking."

It said some Facebook users had received a message such as "This man takes a picture of himself EVERYDAY for 8 YEARS!!" and were encouraged to click on a link.

Sophos said clicking on the link takes a Facebook user to what appears to be a blank page with a "Click here to continue" message.

Sophos said clicking on the page publishes the original message on their own Facebook page with a "like" notation and recommends it to all of their Facebook friends.

"This of course posts a message to your newsfeed, your friends see it and click on it, and so it spreads," Sophos said.

Sophos warned last week about a Facebook scam designed to trick users into installing adware, a software package that automatically plays, displays or downloads advertisements to their computer.
afp

Well, These New Zuckerberg IMs Won't Help Facebook's Privacy Problems

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his company are suddenly facing a big new round of scrutiny and criticism about their cavalier attitude toward user privacy.

An early instant messenger exchange Mark had with a college friend won't help put these concerns to rest.

According to SAI sources, the following exchange is between a 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg and a friend shortly after Mark launched The Facebook in his dorm room:

Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard

Zuck: Just ask.

Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS

[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?

Zuck: People just submitted it.

Zuck: I don't know why.

Zuck: They "trust me"

Zuck: Dumb f***s.

Brutal.

Could Mark have been completely joking? Sure. But the exchange does reveal that Facebook's aggressive attitude toward privacy may have begun early on.

Since Facebook launched, the company has faced one privacy flap after another, usually following changes to the privacy policy or new product releases. To its credit, the company has often modified its products based on such feedback. As the pioneer in a huge new market, Facebook will take heat for everything it does. It has also now grown into a $22 billion company run by adults who know that their future depends on Facebook users trusting the site's privacy policy.

But the company's attitude toward privacy, as reflected in Mark's early emails and IMs, features like Beacon and Instant Personalization, and the frequent changes to the privacy policy, has been consistently aggressive: Do something first, then see how people react.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-ims-wont-help-facebooks-privacy-problems-2010-5#ixzz0nqkSGrvk


businessinsider

Rape and Murder of Teenage Girl puts Pressure on Facebook to provide a Panic Button

As a consequence of the tragic death of a teenage girl caused by a man she met on facebook, a very popular social networking site, Facebook is receiving a lot of pressure from British officials to get a Panic Button showing on the site's web pages.

There has been a whole lot of uproar about the safety of social networking site members specially vulnerable teenagers.

British Child protection authorities have been gathering support for the installation of one click panic button on networking sites which can get a person immediate police help, if he/she feels there is any risk.

The 17 year old girl Ashleigh Hall was kidnapped, raped and murdered by a man named Peter Chapman who created a bogus facebook profile to get close to her online.

Looks like facebook is going to have to do something about the Panic Button issue as Ashleigh Hall facebook issue will not seem to die down without some thing being done .The Ashleigh Hall Peter Chapman story has once again highlighted the dangers of meeting people online. Lets hope Ashleigh Hall will teach us at least a lesson and will help many more teenagers understanding the dangers and avoiding them while making friends online. nybreakingnews.com

Local Radio Host Scammed By Facebook Fraud Reporting

There's an impostor out there and Sharyn Fein of North Dallas is not happy.

"I'm absolutely terrified and I'm very upset."

Someone hacked into Fein's Facebook profile and contacted nearly 50 of her friends.

"I soon discovered that somebody was acting as me. Somebody had been studying who I was and had all my personal information to talk to all of my different friends."

The impostor sent each friend a very convincing message: "I'm in London, I've been robbed and I need your help."

Facebook friend, Mike Rhyner received the message and immediately replied. "Is there anything I can do? She said we don't have any money. Our money and credit cards and cell phone were taken."

Rhyner is co-host of The Hardline on 1310 the Ticket. He says he didn't think twice when he wired his dear friend more than $1,000. "This woman is on my no questions asked list. If she needs something from me, I'm there; period, case closed."

But when serious doubt settled in, the well-known radio host did some checking and discovered his friend was not in London.

"I was grateful because Mike has my back and it's nice to be loved, but I didn't want to come at that great loss. That was a lot of money" says Fein.

Rhyner was able to stop the wire transfer and ultimately got his money back. Fein says she complained to Facebook, but got no results. So the sports talk-show host took to the airwaves to warn his listeners.

Facebook messages preceded robberies

Two February Roslyn robberies began with the victims communicating with the same person on Facebook. In both robberies, the victims both met Emily Clendening, 19, of the 500 block of Enfield Road, Oreland, on Facebook, and Clendening was present for both crimes, according to Abington police.

The first robbery occurred Feb. 10, around the area of Patane and Edgewood avenues, police said. It began when four friends, Dante Dunbar, Avery Jones, Courtney Blodget and Emily Clendening lured the victim, who Clendening met on Facebook, to meet up with the two females.

All four went to meet up with the victim, who was assaulted by Dunbar and Jones, while trying to meet up with Blodget and Clendening, according to police. Dunbar and Jones punched and kicked the victim, according to police. Then they took his cell phone, but left his wallet after finding only $3 in it. The victim identified Dunbar, 21, of the 500 block of King Street, Philadelphia, as they had gone to high school together.

Dunbar, Jones and Blodget were all arrested in connection with the robbery. Dunbar and Jones were both charged with robbery, simple assault, theft by unlawful taking or disposition and receiving stolen property. Blodget was charged with conspiracy for robbery and conspiracy for assault after admitting to police that she knew Jones’ and Dunbar’s “intentions were harmful,” police said.

Police said Clendening was not charged in this robbery, though they did not specify why.

The second robbery, on Feb. 16, happened on the 1200 block of Nolen Road in Roslyn. The victim was told by the same Emily Clendening, whom he told police he met on Facebook, that he could stay with her after he fought with his parents. Police said the victim met with Clendening, who had three males in the car with her, and was told to follow them.

The victim followed the car to Nolen Road, when one of the males got out of the car, showed what appeared to be a semi-automatic gun, knocked the victim to the ground and began kicking him, police said. He then took the victim’s cell phone and $105 in cash.

When speaking to police, the victim used Facebook to identify Clendening.
montgomerynews

Serial Sex Offender Admits Using Facebook To Rape And Murder Teen

Peter Chapman, a registered sex offender, was sentenced to life in prison for kidnapping, raping, and murdering Ashleigh Hall, 17, whom Chapman courted and lured to her death using Facebook.

Chapman was arrested in October 2009 for a minor traffic violation and later led police to the body of a girl, Hall, he had kidnapped, raped, and murdered just hours earlier. Police found Hall 'strangled and dumped in a farmer's field near Sedgefield, County Durham,' the Times Online reports.

According to the Telegraph, Chapman, 33, fooled the girl into thinking he was 'Peter Cartwright, or DJ Pete, a 17 year old labourer living in the Stockton on Tees area.'

The Telegraph goes on to report:

[His fake Facebook profile] attracted interest from 14,600 visitors, almost 3,000 becoming online "friends" and all of whom were females ranging from the age of 13 to 31.

He would then attempt to redirect them to private chatrooms where he would invite them to provide sexual explicit details.[sic][...]Chapman set up two profiles on the Netlog site and there were others on at least nine other sites when he was arrested for killing Ashleigh Hall.

Chapman has been investigated for six violent sexual crimes but convicted only twice.

In 1992, at the age of 15, he was investigated for and, four years later, accused of raping a girl he had befriended. The victim became pregnant, but the charges were dropped.

Four years later, Chapman was accused of assaulting two teenaged prostitutes. He was sentenced to seven years' imprisonment, released in 2001, and arrested again in 2002 for the kidnap and rape of an Ellesmere Port prostitute. The latter case was discontinued.

A UK judge ruled that Chapman must spend at least 35 years in prison before being eligible for release.

Despite Facebook's attempts to safeguard its users from sexual predators, tens of thousands of registered sex offenders have been able to slip through the cracks in security. In 2009, both Facebook and MySpace cracked down on potential predators, but in doing so, they also revealed the weaknesses in their defense measures. huffingtonpost.com

AP Exclusive: Network Flaw Causes Scary Web Error

Alarming network glitch makes the Internet lose track of who is who on Facebook

A Georgia mother and her two daughters logged onto Facebook from mobile phones last weekend and wound up in a startling place: strangers' accounts with full access to troves of private information.

The glitch — the result of a routing problem at the family's wireless carrier, AT&T — revealed a little known security flaw with far reaching implications for everyone on the Internet, not just Facebook users.

In each case, the Internet lost track of who was who, putting the women into the wrong accounts. It doesn't appear the users could have done anything to stop it. The problem adds a dimension to researchers' warnings that there are many ways online information — from mundane data to dark secrets — can go awry.

Several security experts said they had not heard of a case like this, in which the wrong person was shown a Web page whose user name and password had been entered by someone else. It's not clear whether such episodes are rare or simply not reported. But experts said such flaws could occur on e-mail services, for instance, and that something similar could happen on a PC, not just a phone.

"The fact that it did happen is proof that it could potentially happen again and with something a lot more important than Facebook," said Nathan Hamiel, founder of the Hexagon Security Group, a research organization.

Candace Sawyer, 26, says she immediately suspected something was wrong when she tried to visit her Facebook page Saturday morning.

After typing Facebook.com into her Nokia smart phone, she was taken into the site without being asked for her user name or password. She was in an account that didn't look like hers. She had fewer friend requests than she remembered. Then she found a picture of the page's owner.

"He's white — I'm not," she said with a laugh.

Sawyer logged off and asked her sister, Mari, 31, her partner in a dessert catering company, and their mother, Fran, 57, to see whether they had the same problem on their phones. abcnews

Hackers take aim at Facebook users

Kimberly Potts calls Facebook her "lifeline" to her son Justin, who is serving in Iraq with the 101st Engineer Battalion of the Army National Guard. It's helped her stay in contact with him, to see photos of his Thanksgiving dinner and Christmas.

But late last month it also served as a gateway to scammers, who attempted to steal access to credit cards and bank accounts from the Potts family and many of Justin's friends. Justin's Facebook page had been hacked by criminals.

In West Newbury, friends of Pentucket High School senior Matt McCarthy, who died suddenly during a hockey practice, did what thousands of people do — they set up a Facebook page to honor their friend's memory. Within days it had been savaged by posters from other parts of the country who posted swastikas, racial epithets and vicious comments. The page, which had been open to all, was quickly shut off from the public and the hurtful posts were stripped.

With more than 200 million users, Facebook has become a wildly popular forum for people to find old friends, learn about their personal information and keep in touch. But it's also been heavily mined by scammers and used for bullying and taunting.

Users like Kimberly Potts and investigators like Newburyport Police Inspector Brian Brunault say people should be cautious.

"Everything is dark on the Internet," Brunault said, noting he's investigating a case of a Newburyporter whose Facebook account was hacked and identity was stolen. Facebook is inundated with complaints and subpoenas from those who have had problems on the site, he said.

"It takes virtually weeks if not months to get returns on these things," Brunault said. "There is harassment on there, cyber bullying, people post as other people to start trouble and then the thread gets connected and more people jump on board." eagletribune

Hacked Facebook Apps Lead to Fake Antivirus Software

New applications are turning up on Facebook. Unfortunately, some of them are fake antivirus programs.

While researching Web sites that host malicious software, Roger Thompson, chief research officer of software security company AVG, noticed something funny. A Russian Web site known for hosting malware was getting lots of referrals from Facebook.

On further investigation, Thompson found the referrals were coming from a Facebook application called "City Fire Department," a game where multiple players respond to emergency calls. The application had been modified to deliver an iframe, which is a way to bring content from one Web site into another.

PC World