Tag Archive for: facebook
Facebook, Instagram Blasted for ‘Lame’ Security Practices
Fraud Management & Cybercrime
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Social Media
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Video
Account Takeover Claims Grow 1,000% as Scams Hit People, Banks, Government Agencies
More than 4 billion people have accounts on Facebook and Instagram, making them the most popular social media platforms on the planet. Members share photos, life events and opinions to attract followers, build businesses and stay connected with friends and family. But there’s a darker side to these social platforms.
See Also: Live Webinar | Navigating the Difficulties of Patching OT
Social media account takeover complaints to the Identity Theft Resource Center jumped more than 1,000% last year. Theft, impersonation and fake accounts on Facebook and Instagram – social properties of Meta – are fueling a massive increase in scams and illegal activity. In fact, federal authorities say about 50% of account takeover cases today originate on social media.
“We have all these platforms, but who’s taking care of your security? Who’s taking care of your privacy? I don’t think anybody really is. Frankly, I think the efforts are lame.”
– Chris Ingram, author, former radio personality and Facebook identity theft victim
“These social media scams are bigger parts of underlying scams we’re seeing out there,” says Stephen Dougherty, financial fraud investigator with the U.S. Secret Service. “We are seeing…
Mastodon saw huge growth, Facebook led social media charts in traffic: Cloudflare’s 2022 Report
Cloudflare, an American content delivery network and DDoS mitigation company has now shared its year-in-review of 2022, highlighting some of the major internet trends of 2022, including Google reaching the top spot, Instagram replacing Twitter in the social media category, and more.
According to the report, almost 5 billion people have used the internet in 2022. Cloudflare’s report consists of internet data from three different areas such as traffic, adaptation, and security. This report consists of data from January 2nd to November 26, 2022, and the company has said to update the same with the remaining data from 2022 by early 2023.
Internet traffic trends 2022
According to Cloudflare’s report, there is an increase in internet users by 23 per cent in 2022. According to the graph shared by the company, there has been a steady growth in the number of internet users since mid-January 2022. Similarly, there is also a sharp increase in the number of internet users since July.
Most popular internet services of 2022
1. Google
2. Facebook
3. Apple, TikTok (tie)
5. YouTube
6. Microsoft
7. Amazon Web Services
8. Instagram
9. Amazon
10. iCloud, Netflix, Twitter, Yahoo (tie)
Binance has been the go-to cryptocurrency service provider of 2022, similarly, Facebook has been the most popular social media platform of this year. The report also confirms that there has been an increase in bot traffic this year, and this also varies from country to country and 1/3rd of internet traffic comes from bots.
There have been several internet service outages this year, and the biggest outage of this year came from Canada, where, Roger Cables complete loss the traffic and it took over 24 hours to fully restore the network.
When it comes to the adoption of new internet technologies, people have embraced Starlink, a satellite-based wireless internet provider by Elon Musk. Mastodon, a microblogging platform has also seen a massive adaptation, especially after Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition. There has also been an increase in the adaption rate of IPv6 (internet protocol version 6).
Lastly, the report speaks about internet security, “90 per cent of mitigated traffic used the WAF or DDoS mitigation…
Schoolyard Bully Android Malware Wants Your Facebook Login, Not Your Lunch Money
The cybersecurity firm Zimperium, has published a blog post detailing a recently discovered Android malware campaign that has been ongoing since 2018. This campaign spreads a set of malicious apps the researchers are calling the “Schoolyard Bully Trojan” on account of the fact that the malicious apps are disguised as educational apps offering a wide range of books for users to read. However, rather than trying to steal your lunch money with banking malware, the Schoolyard Bully Trojan is out to swipe users’ Facebook account credentials. However, as we’ll discuss, this effort may be a ploy to access victims’ financial accounts after all.
According to the researchers’ findings, this trojan primarily targets Vietnamese users. However, the over 300,000 victims of this malware are spread across at least seventy-one countries, so this malware campaign still poses a threat to users outside of Vietnam. Zimperium researchers identified numerous apps on the Google Play Store that contained the Schoolyard Bully payload. Google has since removed these apps from the Play Store, but they are still available on third-party app stores for unsuspecting users to download.
These fraudulent educational apps include what is presented as a chat feature that integrates with Facebook. When users select the chat tab, the apps present users with the legitimate Facebook login page. However, rather than rendering this webpage with Android System WebView, the apps instead use a custom in-app web browser that injects malicious JavaScript into the webpage. This code extracts any login credentials entered into the page and sends them to a server controlled by the threat actors behind this malicious campaign.
In a dark twist, Meta was caught earlier this year using a custom in-app browser within the Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger apps to inject what appeared to be a tracking script into webpages viewed within these apps. We wrote at the time of this discovery that it raised broader privacy and security concerns, as malicious apps could potentially use this same technique to inject code that…