15 percent of videos on Facebook are Likejacking attacks

First of all, what is Likejacking. Like-jacking is a word inspired from the word Click-jacking which was believed to be inspired from a common word highjacking.

The word Click-jacking means asking a person to click something; while a different action is takes place behind the scenes. For instance an email telling a person to click on a link to download some useful ebook, may actually be installing some cookie on to the user’s PC, to pull user data; without the user knowing it.

In the same way, Likejacking specifically refers to a person clicking on something, for instance to play it, while a different action is taken in the background ‘Likes’ some piece of content, without the person knowing it.

This is typically done with a fake video player window overlayed with a hidden iframe. So when the user clicks on the play button; he/she is actually clicking the Like button on the hidden iframe. As a matter of fact, as the user is clicking on something with a hidden iframe beneath; hence clicking on the said video anywhere submits a Like, promoting the scam in question to the person’s Facebook friends. Which can be a real embarrassment for the person for obvious reasons.

As Likes is are the primary popularity currency on Facebook; no wonder many scammer and spammers are increasingly using Likejacking to attain their objectives.

Symantec a security company recently set out to analyze Likejacking attacks on Facebook. Using a sample of 3.5 million posts with videos on August 2, Symantec found that up to 15 percent of unique posts were identified as Likejacking attacks. Thus Symantec finds that 3 out of every 20 videos on Facebook are Likejacking scams.

The reason for Symantec consducting this Lifejacking analysis on Facebook is to better promote its own product -- Norton Safe Web. Norton Web Safe is a free Facebook app that scans News Feeds and identifies URLs containing security risks, such as phishing sites, malicious downloads, and links to unsafe external sites. To protect against likejacking, detections are displayed as part of the scan report and posted to the user’s Wall so their friends are warned against clicking on the link. --------

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