Beware if you receive an email in the colors of Facebook about alleged copyright infringement, it could be a scam. Researchers from cybersecurity firm Trustwave have detected a phishing campaign exploiting the image of Meta’s social network, with the aim of extorting personal data, Phonandroid reports. They presented the results of their research this Saturday.
This phishing campaign is called “Meta-Phish”. The message that is sent to the victims inbox seems believable. It contains a link to a post that pretends to be Facebook. In particular, we see a fake “Page Support” profile whose display image is the Facebook logo. What reinforces the confidence of the victims towards the crooks.
Threat of account deletion
The subject of the message is a warning of copyright infringement regarding one of the recipient’s Facebook posts. In the absence of notification of an appeal, warns the sender, the account will be deleted within 48 hours. The victim has only one desire, to click on the link provided with the message. That’s when she lands on the fake Facebook page.
On the post, there is another link that leads to a site with the name Meta, like the company that owns Facebook. This is when the victims have to give their username and password to log into their account. This combination is ineffective since the page is a fake Facebook page. But this is enough for the scammers to recover the identifiers. They could then connect to the real Facebook account of their interlocutor and usurp his identity.
Biometric authentication bypassed
The dissemination of personal data also concerns the victim’s IP address and geolocation information. The whole is sent to a Telegram account controlled by the person responsible for phishing. What circumvent security, such as biometric authentication, specify our colleagues.
Trustwave advises caution with emails claiming copyright infringement on Facebook. Note that the social network does not delete an account so easily.