Zango’s at it again, showing the company will stoop to any level to serve pop-up ads to people that don’t want them. What’s being dubbed by security experts as a malicious social worm is brought to you via Zango and Facebook’s open platform.
We remember Zango from when they had to fork over a $3 million to the federal government in 2006 for secretly installing adware that was nearly impossible to delete completely. Kids and young users are a favorite target, most likely because they’re more gullible, even if adult material often pops up through the ad network. Here you go, Billy. A game, a screen saver, and a link to a deviant porn site. The company’s latest sneaky tactic targets Facebook users by piquing their interest in a (non-existent) secret admirer. Users are invited by a friend to download the Secret Crush application, which tells them “One of Your Friends Might Have a Crush on You!” The user is presented with the option to “Find Out Who” or to “Ignore.” Before you can find out who, though, you have to invite at least five friends, who will get the same invitation you got. After you’ve invited those friends, you’re prompted to download the “Crush Calculator,” which is code for “This is BS” and with that download, comes all that Zango adware. Fortinet, the security company that sent out the alert, says this brand of psychological manipulation has already reached 3 percent of Facebook users, or about a million, in a very short time. “What is happening here is actually simple – social networking sites are becoming what the Internet already is in general: a dangerous place,” said Fortinet EMEA Threat Response Team Manager Guillaume Lovet. “People who are unaware, naive, and/or run unpatched browsers are increasingly at risk.” Lovet and Fortinet also expressed concern about the ability of malicious hackers, not just unethical markerters, to use Facebook’s open platform to drive-by install something really nasty on a massive scale.
