1. Guess who viewed your profile — A false claim that an app, often called “Who Views,” will show you who’s viewed your Facebook profile, but it actually installs a spying and spamming virus on your PC.
2. Explicit photos or videos of friends — Victims who click on supplied links are told they need to update their Adobe Flash viewer but they actually install malware.
3. Ads for fake products and services — Bitdefender identified 50,000 questionable domains supposedly selling pharmaceuticals and dating services. A third of the sites were also bogus replicas of genuine pages, used for phony sales or phishing for personal info.
4. Morbid images — a faked video supposedly of a woman being beaten to death is being used to attract victims to gruesome sites that either charge fees or install malware. Another recent fake video claims to show a woman being killed by her husband.
Sadly, Bitdefender predicts big growth in this category as a means of grabbing attention for all sorts of dubious marketing purposes, notably because of children’s increased tolerance of violent images.
Sadly, Bitdefender predicts big growth in this category as a means of grabbing attention for all sorts of dubious marketing purposes, notably because of children’s increased tolerance of violent images.