Facebook Vulnerabilities

​There is a new way for scammers and spammers to target your audience on Facebook. 

Facebook allows visitors to suggest edits for the About sections of public pages. Apparently someone at the company thought, "Let's give the general public some control over other people's online properties. What could possibly go wrong?"

When a change is suggested, it is up to a page admin to accept it or reject it. But there is a huge flaw with this.

One change visitors can suggest is a different website address for your page to link to. So the scammers and spammers go in and suggest their own websites, hoping you will start sending traffic their way.

This would not be a big deal, but as it says in the Facebook Help section, "Keep in mind that changes may be applied automatically if you don't act on them."

That's right. If you do not notice a suggested change, Facebook might just push it through without your knowledge. 

Thanks to this brilliant bit of programming, a Facebook page for a charity organization could suddenly link to a website that looks like a charity but is really just a scam to steal people's money.

What to do:

Every so often, click on your page's "Notifications" and select the "Request" option. Here you can see what suggested edits have been submitted and accept or, more likely, reject them. 

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