The Tech Corner

The Tech Corner is a technology news and advice column presented each week courtesy of Melvin McCrary at Georgia Computer Depot in Cedartown.

Do Not Click on any Facebook messages with video links sent by anyone, even your friend.

Security researchers have discovered a campaign on Facebook Messenger where users receive a video link that redirects them to a fake website that installs malicious software.

Spam campaigns on Facebook are all too common these days. A few years ago, researchers found cyber criminals using booby-trapped JPG images to hide the malware in order to infect Facebook users with variants of the Locky ransomware, which encrypts all files on infected computers until a ransom is paid.

Do not look at images or video links sent by anyone, even your friend, without verifying it with them, and always keep your paid antivirus software up-to-date. after it has already been delivered to your email inbox.

Dubbed Ropemaker (stands for Remotely Originated Post-delivery Email Manipulation Attacks Keeping Email Risky), the trick was uncovered by Francisco Ribeiro, the researcher at email and cloud security firm Mimecast.

A successful exploitation of the Rope maker attack could allow an attacker to remotely modify the content of an email sent by attackers.

“While the use of these web technologies has made email more visually attractive and dynamic relative to its purely text-based predecessor, this has also introduced an exploitable attack vector for email.”

To protect from such attacks, users should rely on web-based email clients like Gmail, iCloud and Outlook, which aren’t affected by Ropemaker-style CSS exploits.