Fake E-Mails Circulating Supposedly From Facebook And Linkedin

Security researchers at Websense the Web and E-mail Security Company are cautioning that bogus e-mails purporting to be from Facebook and LinkedIn are presently striking against innocent people.

The e-mail got from LinkedIn appears as a bogus invitation to join the professional social networking website, while containing malevolent web-links. These links actually divert the e-mail recipient onto another website, which in turn diverts onto yet another. This third website installs an iFrame downloaded from still one more website. A few of the sites refresh to one site whose URL appears to be a web-link connected with a scareware site.

Highlighted the Websense researchers after investigating a lot of the landing websites that they were registered with Indian domains, however, those websites doing bogus anti-virus scans belonged to Latvia, with one other site that was utilized for statistics belonging to India.

Actually, these redirected websites are all created for the sole objective of safeguarding the key website from getting discovered and shut down or banned, the researchers observed.

In the meantime, the fake electronic mails supposedly from Facebook reportedly pretend to be notices about unread messages piling inside the victim's e-mail account.

They tell the recipient that he hasn't visited Facebook shortly, so when he was away, there have been notices waiting for him. The e-mails display the signing entity as "The Facebook Team." Softpedia.com reported this on August 13, 2010.

Now, just like the bogus invitations from LinkedIn, the web-links embedded on the Facebook messages too take users onto malevolent sites.

Meanwhile, cyber-criminals hacking reputed e-mail services' templates and misusing them to distribute authorized notices are not new in business. In fact, spam mails of this type appear to have grown in prevalence during recent months, which indicates the high percentage of success they enjoy, alternatively the reason why spammers constantly invest their resources in them.

Eventually, security specialists recommend that users should exercise caution while following web-links in e-mails, no matter whether the messages have been sent from a source they are familiar with and in which they repose trust. For, they will then not become an unfair prey of any scam.

Related article: Fake Spam Mail Announces Australian PM’s Heart Attack

» SPAMfighter News - 8/20/2010