Facebook’s Become a Phisher’s Playground

Facebook has become the fourth-most targeted Web site for phishing scams, according to the latest data collected by security software maker Kaspersky Lab.

It’s not a big surprise that phishers using complex and targeted malware to steal banking and credit card data would find a healthy niche in the faux-Facebook world.

In fact, besides PayPal, the Promised Land for phishers, and few other sites, Facebook has become the site con artists most emulate in the hopes of tricking social networking fans into divulging things like account usernames and passwords, login credentials and the long list of their closest friends and family members to target with more malware campaigns.

As eSecurity Planet found, the sheer popularity of the world’s largest social networking site is exactly the reason so many international phishing syndicates are honing their skills and their malware applications to socially engineer thousands of people and companies out of their money and their privacy.

Phishers looking to snag users’ personal banking and credit card information have taken a shine to the world’s largest social networking site, according to the latest Internet security report from antivirus software vendor Kaspersky Lab.

Through the first three months of 2010, Facebook’s share of phishing attacks surged to 5.7 percent, placing it fourth on the list of most-targeted Web sites behind only PayPal, the runaway top spot for phishing attacks accounting for more than 52 percent of all scams, eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY) and HSBC.

In other words, according Kaspersky’s first quarter report, more than half of the bogus, malware-infected phishing Web sites were masquerading as PayPal and roughly 6 percent were ruses designed to get Facebook fans to login and divulge their personal information.

Read the full story at eSecurity Planet:


Phishers Pedaling Facebook Scams in Record Numbers