A phishing attack on Facebook users
This article is 9 years old — prices and terms may have changed.
A new phishing attack has hit the users of the Facebook social network. It is aimed at people who use Facebook through mobile apps and at users of Apple iCloud, Comcast, Craigslist and OfferUp.
Specialists at PhishLabs have described the attack in detail. The attackers exploit the fact that mobile browsers do not show the whole link in the address bar. To make a link look genuine, hyphens and subdomains are added to the URL.
For example, in the address
hxxp://m.facebook.com----------------validate----step1.rickytaylk[dot]com/sign_in.html
the real domain is rickytaylk.com, not m.facebook.com. Because the mobile browser shows only part of the link rather than the whole of it, users see m.facebook.compreceded by a row of hyphens.
The attackers collect credentials and use them to send spam with links to phishing sites to the user's friends by SMS. The point is that most SMS apps make it impossible to see the whole of a link sent in them.
The attack will most likely affect only inattentive users, so pay attention to where the link you are clicking leads.
Source http://www.securitylab.ru/