Facebook Attacks Feeding Fraudulent Affiliates

Allison Howen — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 13:30:00 GMT

Most Facebook attacks are feeding fraudulent affiliate marketing sites according to a new report.

The Internet Threats Trend Report from Commtouch reports that affiliate marketing sites are the final destination of 74 percent of all Facebook scams. Visitors to these sites are prompted to fill out surveys that generate affiliate payments for the scammers, which abuses businesses that pay affiliate fees.

Fooled users are encouraged to click on the scams through social engineering tactics, such as free merchandise offers, celebrity news, fake Facebook applications or through messages from friends that say something like “check this out!”

According to the study, these deceptions are being spread through a number of ways. Users willingly click on the like or share button 48 percent of the time, while 52 percent of the time likes and shares are generated through likejacking, scripts and malware. And, if just five friends continually share or like these attacks, it can be spread to 9,765,625 people within a few hours.

“Facebook scammers are out to make money, and affiliate marketing is a rich source,” says Amir Lev, Commtouch’s chief technology officer. “The same social engineering techniques that malware distributors and spammers have been using for years to induce people to open their unwanted mail or click on malicious links are being leveraged within Facebook and other popular social networks for ill-gotten gains.”

And although Facebook has made attempts to block malicious content, users can protect themselves and friends against Facebook attacks by using caution when “liking” or sharing something, being suspicious of offers for free stuff, not following links with generic text, avoiding links that promise a newsworthy scoop and being cautious of the applications they download.

Q1 ’10 Internet Threats Report

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 14:53:00 GMT

CommTouch released its Internet Threats Trend Report for Q1 2010 and, no surprise here, spammers have become adept at using the familiar Internet names to give an air of legitimacy to their deception.

This quarter’s trend report analyzes the percentage of spam that actually emanates from Gmail. Five to ten percent of all spam appears to originate from Gmail according to the report. The report is based on the analysis of more than two billion email messages, as well as the GlobalView™ URL database within CommTouch’s cloud-based global detection and classification centers.

“Spammers and cybercriminals use experimentation to reach their goals,” said Asaf Greiner, Commtouch vice president, products. “They are always testing new techniques to lure their victims, from using familiar formats and domains to creating entirely new ways to entice action.”

Other highlights from the Q1 Trend Report include:

- Spam levels averaged 83% of all email traffic throughout the quarter, peaking at nearly 92% near the end of March and bottoming out at 75% at the start of the year.

- Pharmacy spam remained in the top spot with 81% of all spam messages, maintaining last quarter’s average, as did the number 2 topic, replicas, which maintained its average of 5.4%.

- An average of 305,000 zombies were activated daily to inflict malicious activity.

- While Brazil continues to produce the most zombies, its numbers decreased in the first quarter. In Q4 2009, it was responsible for 20.4% of global zombie activity. In Q1 2010, that number dropped to 14%.

'Net Features : commtouch

Facebook Attacks Feeding Fraudulent Affiliates

Q1 ’10 Internet Threats Report