Facebook Applications Used For Phishing

It would be easy to think that once someone has logged in successfully to Facebook—and not a phishing site—that the security threat is largely gone. However, that’s not quite the case, as we’ve seen before.

Earlier this week, however, Trend Micro researcher Rik Ferguson found at least two—if not more—malicious applications on Facebook. (These were the Posts and Stream applications.) They were used for a phishing attack that sent users to a known phishing domain, with a page claiming that users need to enter their login credentials to use the application. The messages appear as notifications in a target user’s legitimate Facebook profile, as shown below. The links to the malicious site are highlighted:

Figure 1. Facebook notifications page

After entering the credentials, users would then be redirected to Facebook itself. (The posts detailing these findings can be found at the Counter Measures blog; the initial report is here and a follow-up was posted here.)

While Trend Micro has informed Facebook of these findings, users should still exercise caution when entering login credentials. They should be doubly sure that these are being entered into legitimate sites, and not carefully crafted phishing sites. The particular site involved in this phishing attack is already blocked by the Smart Protection Network.

Image credits: thanks to Rik Ferguson, Countermeasures blog.