This weekend we saw another spate of Facebook messages claiming to link to a BBC News report of the death of Lady Gaga.
Of course, the claims are untrue – and Lady Gaga is still alive.
But that isn’t stopping Facebook scammers from creating money-making websites that claim that the eccentric pop star has been found dead in her hotel room, and tricking Facebook users into sharing the links.
BREAKING: Lady Gaga Found Dead in Hotel Room 🙁 mjide35w
[LINK]
This is the most awful day in US history
You would think that the scammers would show a little more imagination – rather than using the same disguises time and time again. But, hey, if the scam is working for them – why change it?
Clicking on the link will take you a third-party website, posing as a BBC News online report, which attempts to trick you into clicking on what appears to be a video thumbnail.
In the above screenshot you can see that Sophos Anti-Virus (in this case, our free anti-virus for Mac users) has correctly warned about the webpage and prevented you from being clickjacked.
We’ve seen scams very much like this, many times before.
Facebook could do a much better job, in my opinion, at helping users avoid falling for tricks like this and clean-up a lot of the mischievous pages and dangerous links on its network.
For instance, a quick search of “Lady Gaga dead” finds a number of Facebook pages attempting to spread the rumour of the artist’s demise.
Some of which have clearly been created with a scam in mind, like this following clickjacking example:
Watch out if you try to play the video as this is a clickjacking scam which attempts to silently say you “Like” the page when you click with your mouse.
If you’ve been hit by scams like this, remove the messages and likes from your Facebook page – and warn your friends not to click on the offending links. Clearly, Facebook needs to work much harder to prevent attacks like this from reoccurring and spreading so rapidly.
If you’re a Facebook user and want to keep up on the latest threats and security news I would recommend you join the Sophos Facebook page – where more than 100,000 people regularly discuss the latest attacks.
