Scammers Create Rogue Social Media Apps
BOSTON (CBS) - Scammers are constantly cruising social media sites hunting for access to your money and your personal information. Even the savviest social media users are being fooled because these scams look like they're coming from your friends of family. Amy McGraw fell for a phishing scam that she thought was just a tweet from a friend. The message was "you've got to check out this pic I found of the two of us" with a link. Minutes after clicking that link the same message was sent to her entire address book.
Another trick is called "like" jacking or "click" jacking. "Have you ever seen one of those posts from your friend and you go why did Joe post that? Joe could have been looking at football scores and clicked on a link to watch a video but behind the scenes what's happening is there's an invisible 'like' button," says John Harrison of Symantec, an internet security group.
WBZ-TV's Paula Ebben reports
Unknowingly clicking that button could update your status with spam or even change your privacy settings.
Some scammers are creating rogue social media apps that look legit but can actually give hackers access to your account. Harrison says, "Find out whether these are real applications before you install things." Even those shortened URL's could be a trap and take you to a website that will silently infect your computer with malware.
Computers security experts says once your account has been compromised changing your password is usually enough to get rid of hackers.
