Links in Messages and Wall Posts

At one time or another, I’m sure you have seen at least one of your friends post a link to your Wall or send you a message with a link in it that supposedly leads to a YouTube video. While many people do post links to YouTube to their friends’ Walls or in messages, a lot of these Wall posts and messages are actually being sent by a hacker. This article explains how you can tell if the Wall post or message was actually sent by your friend and why the link is unsafe to click if the Wall post or message is actually from a hacker.

Common Features

Wall posts and messages sent by hackers from your friends’ accounts will have a link in them, usually claiming to be to YouTube. It will usually be described as being a funny video or a video or picture of you or one of your friends.

However, especially for those messages claiming to link you to YouTube, if you look where the link is, there will usually be text that says “YouTube.com”, but after that text will be a link to a completely different website. Just because the message claims that the link goes to YouTube, doesn’t mean it really does. On Facebook, this is very easy to tell since Facebook forces you to print the actual address of a link.

Finally, when you get one of these links in a message, the message will usually be to a lot of people, all who have names that are very close together alphabetically. If you get the link posted on your Wall, you will probably see a whole bunch of stories on your friends’ profile about them posting that same link or a similar one to a whole bunch of their friends, also with names close together alphabetically (and in alphabetical order).

Meaning of the Common Features

The meaning of the content of the messages and posts is easy: the hackers try to sound like the friend that is sending the link, and they try to make a description that a lot of people will fall for, like saying the link is to a funny video or to a video of people that you know.

YouTube is usually the site claimed by the message to host the link since it’s very popular and a trusted site. However, if “youtube.com” does not show up in the actual link (links in Facebook are blue and become underlined when you hover the cursor over them, text can NOT do this, it always shows up black), then the link doesn’t actually take you to YouTube, it’s most likely to another site that tries to steal your information (see the article on phishing for more information). Checking to see if “youtube.com” shows up in the address is a simple check that will help you avoid most hackers, but cleverer hackers could get around this check (hover here to see how to spot this).

Finally, the reason why these messages and posts are sent to many people all with names close together alphabetically is simple: it’s how the hack works. It goes through the hacked profile’s friends list in order, sending out the link to each and every one. So, if you see a message like this or see the same link posted by the same person to a whole bunch of other profiles, then that person has been hacked and the links should not be trusted.

What to do with these messages

First and foremost, DO NOT click the link. There are a number of things a website run by a hacker can do, which range from stealing your Facebook log-in information to identity theft and infecting your computer with viruses. Some key things to remember are to never enter your log-in information into these sites (even if the page looks like a Facebook log-in page, see phishing), never enter any personal information, and never download anything. This last one may seem obvious, but it isn’t hard to trick people into downloading things they think are legitimate. For example, the site may bring up a pop-up telling you that you need to download an anti-virus program or software update. For more information, see the article about third-party sites. Although the article focuses on applications that supposedly rely on these sites, the information there applies to the links in the messages discussed in this article as well.

Secondly, take some kind of preventive action. If the link is posted to your Wall, delete it immediately. It’s presence on your Wall poses no danger to you, but if one of your friends is viewing your profile and the link is still there, they might click it and eventually get themselves hacked, or worse. So, to protect your friends, just delete the link from your Wall by clicking the “Remove” button that shows up when you hover over that posting.

If the link comes to you in a message and is sent to a whole bunch of people, then warn the other people by telling them not to click the link, and then hit “Reply All”. Some hackers have tried to prevent people from warning others by making it look like you can’t Reply All to such messages. They do this by having a whole bunch of blank lines after the main part of the message, meaning that the box you would type the reply message in initially doesn’t show up on the screen, the page must be scrolled down to see it. Keep this in mind when trying to reply to one of these messages in order to warn people.

Finally, you should tell the person sending out the links that they have been hacked and should change their password. In most cases this should solve the problem since it’s their password that the hackers need in order to gain access to their account. However, some hackers will even change their password on them, locking them out of their account, so not only can they not change their password to stop the hackers, they can’t even log in to tell their friends not to click the links they are sending out. If this happens, they can follow the instructions provided by Facebook’s Help Center, which are available even while logged out of Facebook.