New Facebook clickjacking scam spreads like fire

A new and extremely viral clickjacking scam has been spotted targeting curious Facebook users.

It hooks them with links to titillating, disgusting or “amazing” videos that their friends apparently “liked”, but once they click on the link, they are redirected to a splash page where they are asked to jump through some hoops in order to watch the video:

Unfortunately, their clicks are hijacked to “like” the video without their knowledge and to post the same bait message on their own Walls, while they are redirected to a page seemingly containing that and other interesting videos.

The scammers effect the clickjacking and redirection by using a number of JavaScripts, and land the user on one of around 300 similar pages that contain the video and a bucketful of link ads.

As scams go, this one seems pretty effective given the diversity of interest-piquing video baits. The scammers earn their money from the owners of the aforementioned sites, who earn a small amount of money for each click on an ad that captures the victims’ fancy.

“The JavaScript code is obfuscated and packed, this makes the entire debugging more difficult, but during the research I have identified several domains connected to this scam,” says Kaspersky Lab Expert David Jacoby. “It also seems that they use redirectors to prevent URL/Domain blacklisting, and there are also several different scams on each server.”