Facebook fertile grounds for adware and phishing scams

It was bound to happen, since Facebook is so popular and so wide open to attach ones own programs onto, now there's both forced adware downloads on facebook and chinese hackers phishing scams in innocent looking "wall" scrawlings. You might want to log out of facebook now and never log back since if it's not facebook itself spying on you, someone else will. Social networking sites aren't built out of the goodness of some geeks heart but as a place where they can make lots of money from advertisers (you know this), so if you don't want all sorts of data collected about you, just delete your account.

Wired: Fraudsters Target Facebook With Phishing Scam

Some Facebook users checking their accounts Wednesday found odd postings of messages on their "wall" from one of their friends, saying: "lol i can't believe these pics got posted.... it's going to be BADDDD when her boyfriend sees these," followed by what looks like a genuine Facebook link.

But the link leads to a fake Facebook login page hosted on a Chinese .cn domain. The fake page actually logs the victims into Facebook, but also keeps a copy of their user names and passwords.

Red In The Face: Zango Adware Surfaces On Facebook

IN WHAT APPEARS TO BE an attempt to distribute adware on social networking sites, Zango is now bundling its software with a Facebook widget, according to a new report by online security company Fortinet. Zango said Thursday afternoon it was still investigating Fortinet's report. Facebook did not respond to requests for comment.

As detailed by Fortinet, Zango is being distributed via "Secret Crush," an application that tells Facebook members that one of their friends has a crush on them and then leads users through a series of screens to find out more information. At one point, users are told that they must provide the names of five friends to continue.

Finally, Facebook members are taken to a page where they can download a "crush calculator" that's bundled with Zango's ad-serving software, which trails people as they surf the Web and serves them pop-up ads. That last page discloses that Zango will serve users ads based on the pages they visit online.

I actually had someone send that thing to me, but declined it since it plain looked fishy. Also, I never use any application that forces me to harass five friends.