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Facebook Malware Campaign, India 1st in a Number of Affected Countries

facebook malware Affected Countries

India has ranked first in the list of affected countries after a Facebook malware drive has re-emerged after laying dormant for a few months. 

According to investigations carried out by certain cybersecurity firms, India alone fell prey to more than 600 infections in January that is wreaking havoc on Facebook.

The particular Facebook malware had originally taken rook back in 2016 which was known to apply combinations of browser infections, Windows trojan, clever scripting, and bugs deployed in Facebook’s platform. 

The malware is known to be organized and run by a group of hackers called SilentFade and made news for being a very refined and unique technique that targets millions of  Facebook users.

Experts have recently analyzed the malware campaign and found many parallels between the latest and the former SilentFade gang drive.

Facebook and previously announced that the group of hackers had defrauded the affected victims for more than $4 million which was mal-utilized to post malicious ads across the network.

Formerly, it was observed that when the malware first started infecting Facebook users in 2016, the deployed trojan would gain unauthorized access to Facebook accounts by hijacking user browsers to track website cookies and passwords.

Whilst the threat actors gained access, they would then hunt for accounts that had all forms of payment modes linked to the user’s profile.

If such an account was discovered, Silentfade would then buy their Facebook ads with the target’s funds.

The social media giant had stated that SilentFade was an element of a bigger trend and that multiple hackers appearing to base in China had repeatedly targeted the network and their user base.

“Hackers primarily abuse social media platforms to target their victims and the easiest way for them is by showing ads that we are most likely to click on,” it added.

Following India, Brazil and Indonesia have come in the second and third rankings respectively for being the most infected countries with Brazil standing at 255 infections and Indonesia at 221 infections. 

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