| Facebook Fan Check Virus |
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Facebook Fan Check Virus Fact or Fiction?
Fan Check is one of the fastest growing applications I have seen on facebook, after all who isn't interested to see statistics about which of their facebook friends has most time on their hands?
But yesterday as several real facebook services struggled under the weight of the increased activity claim and counter claim were made about this application being a virus.
How much damage can an application do, and is it better to be safe than sorry?
So, we all see a friend with the status update, something like: URGENT!!!! APPARENTLY THE FAN CHECK THING IS A BAD VIRUS THAT TAKES 48HRS TO KICK IN!!!! EVEN IF YOU ARE TAGGED IN A PHOTO THE VIRUS STILL GETS TO YOU!!! PLEASE INFORM ALL YOUR FRIENDS AND REMOVE/DELETE IT ASAP!!! COPY & PASTE THIS AS YOUR STATUS.................... First of all the claim that even if you are tagged in a photo the virus still gets to you. So if I tag you in a photo it's somehow possible that this has some access to your account, as though you had clicked on agreeing for an application to access your account. This is simple not possible, if it was it would have been put to massive use by now.
Other claims I have seen are that "the person who tagged me said they never tagged me at all - someone tagged him - now he can't access his account - he went to the person who tagged him they got a notifitcation and it's wiped out their account too."
So, an application without permission being given is able to install itself on someones facebook profile just because they are friends with someone who did it? This is pretty improbable stuff here.
So if it's true what should we do? If it is true that somehow a facebook application is able to self permit itself to peoples profiles and once in there delete their photo albums, then the first thing you should look to doing is stop being a fan of Fan Check if you are, and remove the application from your facebook account. Of course if the reports of you not even needing to have the application installed are true, this won't really help, but then if that's the case we are all going to lose our photos anyway...
The first thing I do when I want to know if a virus warning is real or not is check on the websites for the large Anti Virus manufacturers. It's there job to know about these things, and at the time of writing only one reputable company has commented, and that comment is that it's probably scareware. Read Graham Cluley's Blog.
This screenshot is taken from facebooks help page here. I always recommend getting as near to the horse mouth as possible for security advice.
Again for the facebook help page here.
Hopefully by now we've reassured you that the application itself can't do much damage, so what of the theory that it's better to be safe than sorry.
First of all in order to fully understand that question we need to look at what could be gained by spreading such a hoax. We call it Black Hat SEOing which is a term often used to describe the 'cheat your way to the top' method.
Normally websites achieve high search engine rankings by being useful and having good content, this causes people to link to the website, and of course use it, but this can take time. The Black Hat technique is achieved in this case by using social networking as a tool to create demand, and then having the website in place to meet that demand.
Naturally as a lot of people read the virus warning alerts they turned to google. Very quickly this leads to a lot of searches for a few well placed keywords, and one site which is hosted on blogspot.com has taken advantage of that search with a very well chosen blog name. This blog has only two posts which claim that only two programs can as yet detect the virus.
After researching the two named programs they have both returned plenty of google results about being fake programs which imitate real anti virus software and then offer to clean your PC after you have paid for the program.
To summarise, although it is often better to be safe than sorry, in the case of virus alerts always look to the large AV producers to see what they are saying about it before panicing, as the simple effect of warning other users is creating an artificial demand for a worthless product which in itself can compromise your web security.
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