By Dave Moore, CISSP
10/09/2022
Number Three in our list of “careful where you click” items: fake friends and contacts on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and numerous dating websites.
Facebook has sent me plenty of phony friend attempts. Look, “Sandy Jim” wants to be my Facebook friend. Whoo-hoo! Except, it’s completely fake. It gets better. Once, Angelina Jolie wanted to be my FaceBook friend. Fun, but fake.
The dating website Match.com has had real trouble with scammers and fake profiles. It would appear you were getting contacts from attractive prospects, but they would turn out to be fake. Sometimes it would play out where the person you are allegedly “flirting” with, talking back and forth and sending messages, would eventually start pitching lines like, “Oh, if I just had $800 for a plane ticket, I could come visit you and we would have the most wonderful weekend.”
Things got so bad that the Federal Trade Commission ended up suing the owner of Match for using fake ads and exposing its customers to fraud.
Beware. Social media sites are often just a shiny front end for the Internet bad guys to hide behind. When in doubt, take a step back and ask, “Is this real, or fake?” Search the Internet and find out.
- Fake news stories. Holy smokes, websites are just crawling with this kind of garbage. You’ll be looking at a website and there it is: you simply have to find out about Kim Kardashian and her secret butt surgery, don’t you?
My best advice is please, avoid these things at all costs, because you will be going to these websites and fully half the stuff you see will be news-ads, and half of that will be fake ads and fake news stories designed to suck you in and take your money. Many will be genuine tabloid news stories, but a large portion of them will be nothing but sucker bait.
We’ve all seen them: rows and rows of fake news stories. You will be reading a legitimate website and you start scrolling down and there will be all these rows of stories, right? None of them are news stories. They are ads, and they are like falling into a bottomless pit of scams. Oh, but look! See how the octo-mom is doing. Child actors! Barnies last words; aw, that’s sad. Hidden signs that someone is a psychopath; I definitely want to read that. How farting can make you live longer! Really? Do you see what I mean?
I’ll leave you with one last story. You know how you’ll do a Google search, and there will be a list of small text-only ads off to the right side? As an experiment, just to see what would happen, a gentleman by the name of Didier Stevens took out one of these small ads, and it said: “Drive-by download. Is your PC virus-free? Get it infected here!”
By the time the experiment was over, 409 people had clicked the ad. Google for Didier Stevens drive-by download ad,” to read the full story; it’s pretty interesting.
Dave Moore, CISSP, has been fixing computers in Oklahoma since 1984. Founder of the non-profit Internet Safety Group Ltd, he also teaches Internet safety community training workshops. He can be reached at 405-919-9901 or internetsafetygroup.org