Internet Culture

A Facebook bug is tagging your mom in porn

Well, that’s mortifying.

Photo of Miles Klee

Miles Klee

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I don’t know what kind of weirdos are looking at porn on Facebook, but there’s at least 110,000 of them: That’s how many people fell victim to an especially embarrassing piece of malware over just two days of monitoring by virus researchers at Full Disclosure.

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In a brief report for the site, Mohammad R. Faghani explains how the nefarious bit of programming works:

The trojan tags the infected user’s friends in an enticing post. Upon opening the post, the user will get a preview of a porn video which eventually stops and asks for downloading a (fake) flash player to continue the preview. The fake flash player is the downloader of the actual malware.

That malware uses a new technique that Faghani calls “Magnet,” which entails sharing the porn video by tagging a user’s friends—including parents, employers, and significant others. These X-rated wall posts, Faghani notes, “may be seen by friends of the victim’s friends as well, which leads to a larger number of potential victims.” Because it only tags 20 people each time, the malware has stayed under the radar despite its rampant spread since late January.

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The silver lining, it would seem, is that even some moms are taking the bait.

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Anyway, take heed, and maybe tab over to Pornhub if you need to watch something dirty?

H/T Metro | Photo via Alan Levine/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

 
The Daily Dot