Facebook Music Theme

By now, we are all familiar with Facebook scams that claim to give your Newsfeed a designer look. Remember Facebook Red or Facebook Black? Those pretty themes ended up spreading spam and malicious links via online surveys and fake videos. Today, the AVAST Virus Lab experts discovered a unique variety– the Facebook Music Theme Scam.

The Facebook Music Theme Scam is supposed to change the theme and add a song to your Facebook page. But when our Virus Lab expert, Honza Zika, investigated, he got more than danceable music tracks, “What this code does is modify Facebook. It automatically liked 32 photos, people, groups, ... See my activity log, that is just half of it.”

Activity log after music theme was applied

It looks like a rather silly prank, but Zika went on to explain about the alarming scale of the scam.

“On a serious note, this really is pretty big," said Zika. "On the third screenshot you can see the predicted impact - that is the number of people that auto-liked the profile pic." The number was 37,000 when the screenshot was taken.

The potential impact is huge

As the investigation continued, a second script was found to be executed. That script continued adding auto-likes, resulting in some of the pages harvesting over 1 million likes. As we told you in a previous blog post about Facebook scams, the goal of like-harvesters is to increase the value of Facebook pages so they can be sold on the underground markets to other scammers to peddle questionable products and services and distribute additional scams.

Ultimately, Zika said that no malicious code was found, but the executed scripts auto-liked multiple items, changed the Facebook theme, and tried to play a MP3 file.

“It’s not my taste in music, but we didn’t find anything that could or would harm your computer- yet.”

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