Friendster is not back – DICT

THE Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) warned Filipinos against the sudden resurgence online of the social media “new Friendster” as it is being used for phishing.

In a statement issued by the DICT’s National Computer Emergency Response Team (DICT-NCERT), they said that based on their analysis of the IP address hosting the new Friendster, it showed that it “had previous reports about phishing, brute force and DDoS attacks, hacking and host exploitations.”

“Having said that, there is a possibility that the said website is being used for phishing,” the DICT-NCERT said.

“Friendster was one of the top online networking services way back in 2004. Time went on until Friendster could not keep up with the fast-growing network world. Unfortunately, in 2015, the site had to shut down its social networking services due to lack of the company’s technology which led to a bad user experience,” they added.

Stunner, a page from Facebook, posted about Friendster being back on social media.

The DITC-NCERT said that thousands of people have already signed up for the “new” Friendster. However, CERT-PH has assessed that the said website is possibly used for phishing.

For now, they had had updated the post to which it now included the warning from DICT-NCERT regarding the “new” Friendster site.

According to the advice, “the website uses WordPress for its main service, which is not used for social networking platforms since it is a content management system.”

It also said that the link provided actually uses a “non-popular top-level domain (.click).”

They also note a highly important detail in the so-called new Friendster website likewise does not have an “About Us” page, which for them could have provided information on who developed the website.