Epic Facebook Worm Going Around
- Thread starter machinecontrol
- Start date
i got nailed with this too - ben from POF posted it and i clicked for a laugh, thinking it was just up for lolz. NOPE - that fucker works quick
At anypoint, did he not foresee this getting out of hand, not getting paid a penny when it does, and going down for it? Its one thing if it was a prank, but did he seriously think he was going to get away without hundreds of affiliates realizing he was promoting an offer from a CPA network, and facebook finding out?
Generally networks frown on traffic from anything even remotely perceived to be from hacked/phished/forced spam post traffic after the MySpace issues - http://www.wickedfire.com/industry-news/7460-myspace-sues-20-ad-networks-over-500-million.html .
Also, the exploit/worm can easily be legally interpreted as violating a slew of federal statutes dealing with unauthorized computer access - Hell, Shawn Hogan's cookie stuffing escapades apparently qualifies as wire fraud, at least for the filing of a lawsuit. No (US Based, legit) network wants to touch this kind of traffic due to the potential liability.
Oh, and it looks like the exploit that hit me after checking the link in Ilya's "event invite" may be the same one that Facebook claimed to have fixed, on the 8th per Spammers exploit second Facebook bug in a week - Computerworld .
this is a different situation. the MySpace lawsuit involved Can-Spam compliancy around messages being sent within MySpace.. since this exploit has nothing to do with the sending/receiving of internet messages, I highly doubt any action will be taken. they'll patch and move on.
unauthorized computer access? what about 3rd party cookies from ad networks? no damage is being done here. also, the Shawn Hogan lawsuit is still under litigation. I don't remember seeing anything about wire fraud but proving that is going to be next to impossible
if i were the advertiser i'd TOTALLY scrub the traffic. no way. you drag my brand through the mud? fuck that.
i reported it about 4-5 days but those fuckers are still running it on FB. Rather than disapproving our FB ads left and right, i wish facebook could fix these scammers for good
Not just paranoia... it's not like he can get come back to the states or canada they will probably arrest him on site at teh airport. He's stuck on a little fuckin remote island for many years to come lol.
If anyone is still interested in how the worm works, I found a great explanation,with code, here:
Hacking Entrepreneurship: Reverse engineering the latest Facebook worm
It's actually quite simple and brilliant: they put the code FB inserts to prevent this in a textarea tag so it doesn't run.
Hacking Entrepreneurship: Reverse engineering the latest Facebook worm
It's actually quite simple and brilliant: they put the code FB inserts to prevent this in a textarea tag so it doesn't run.
well obviously the advertiser in question had no brand - but dropping that traffic on eharmony or something? if i were the advertiser i'd have a basis to not pay 'em regardless. sketchy traffic is sketchy traffic
I received about 40-50 invites yesterday within 5 minutes, so I knew something was up and didn't click on anything (including one from mgrunnin, one from Mike Krongel, etc)