GEC NEWS WIREESET researchers analyzed a scam campaign on Facebook that spreads a malicious browser plugin via social engineering techniques. The attack starts by luring a Facebook user into playing a video, most often titled “My first video”, “My video” or “Private video”.
Dubai (UAE) is among the countries infected including USA, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Finland, Greece, the Netherlands, India, Latvia, Nepal, Norway, Pakistan, Poland, Qatar, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Switzerland, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Bangladesh, Afganistan among others.
After clicking on the link, the victim is directed to a fake YouTube website where, instead of downloading and playing the video, he/she is requested to install an additional extension. If the victim installs the malicious plug-in, his/her browser becomes infected and carries the infiltration further: his/her Facebook wall becomes flooded with fake video posts tagging multiple friends from their friends list and subsequently, all online friends will receive an identical message via Messenger with the same harmful contents.
“The malicious campaign is spreading spam messages and infecting Facebook accounts with a very high rate of success. At this point, the infiltration only targets Chrome users, but there is no guarantee that it will not spread to other browsers in the future. Also, it has potential to become more dangerous in the future, spreading other, more powerful malware with new capabilities.” said Lukas Stefanko, ESET Malware Researcher.
