Facebook Fight Back Against Likejacking Scams

Last week our blog post was about clickjacking (also dubbed likejacking scams) so we won’t go into much detail about how the scams to say, other than to say it is the recently prolific scam of hiding Facebook Like buttons underneath images in a bid to trick online viewers into clicking and inadvertently liking external pages.

However Facebook has actually stopped such scams in their tracks by replacing their one-click Like button with a new version that requires users to confirm their “Like” before the action is posted on the Facebook users newsfeed.

The update, which has already been implemented, prevents the one-click nature of the Like button by replacing it with a three step process. Firstly an Internet user clicks the Like button displayed on a website, and the word Confirm appears. Upon clicking Confirm a pop-up appears giving information about the webpage the user is about to Like. The user then has the opportunity to confirm the “Like” action, or cancel it altogether.

Of course this means Facebook clickjacking scams, which rely on a user inadvertently clicking a Like button and hence “liking “ a page, become almost impossible since users will have to confirm a pop-up to complete the “liking” process, giving potential victims a chance to cancel the action once they realise they have been duped.

Whilst clickjacking is a broader term that is not specific to Facebook, this action may mean we have seen the last of Facebook clickjacking (likejacking) scams.

The move is also going to give Facebook some rare positive feedback from privacy and security experts, amidst all the current controversy the social networking giant is facing, specifically the imminent move to begin sharing the contact details of Facebook users with third party Facebook application developers.