Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

SecurityWeekSecurityWeek

Cybercrime

Facebook Sues Chinese Company Over Ad Fraud

Facebook on Thursday filed suit in California against one organization and two individuals for engaging in ad fraud on the social media platform.

Facebook on Thursday filed suit in California against one organization and two individuals for engaging in ad fraud on the social media platform.

The defendants, Hong Kong-based ILikeAd Media International Company Ltd. and its employees, Chen Xiao Cong and Huang Tao, tricked Facebook users into installing malware that provided them with the ability to compromise people’s accounts.

Using the hijacked Facebook accounts, the defendants ran ads that promoted items such as counterfeit goods and diet pills.

Facebook filed the lawsuit to hold the Chinese company accountable for creating the malware, deceiving individuals into installing it, and then compromising people’s accounts to run the deceptive ads through them.

In some cases, the defendants used images of celebrities (“celeb bait”) to entice people into clicking on ads, the social platform says.

In other instances, they engaged in a practice known as cloaking, where they deliberately disguised the destination of the link in their ads. Specifically, the version of the ad’s landing page displayed to Facebook’s systems was different from the version delivered to Facebook users.

Cloaking schemes, the company explains, are often sophisticated and well organized, and holding the entities behind them accountable isn’t easy. Thus, there have been few legal actions taken against such schemes.

The social platform says it has refunded victims of this scheme and also helped them secure their accounts.

Advertisement. Scroll to continue reading.

“To protect Facebook users and disrupt these types of schemes, we will continue our work to detect malicious behavior directed towards our platform and enforce against violations of our Terms and Policies,” the company also notes.

Related: Facebook Nixes Billions of Fake Accounts

Related: Facebook: Third-Party App Developers Improperly Accessed User Information

Related: Facebook Expands, Enhances Bug Bounty Programs

Written By

Ionut Arghire is an international correspondent for SecurityWeek.

Click to comment

Trending

Daily Briefing Newsletter

Subscribe to the SecurityWeek Email Briefing to stay informed on the latest threats, trends, and technology, along with insightful columns from industry experts.

Join the session as we discuss the challenges and best practices for cybersecurity leaders managing cloud identities.

Register

SecurityWeek’s Ransomware Resilience and Recovery Summit helps businesses to plan, prepare, and recover from a ransomware incident.

Register

Expert Insights

Related Content

Cybercrime

The changing nature of what we still generally call ransomware will continue through 2023, driven by three primary conditions.

Cybercrime

A recently disclosed vBulletin vulnerability, which had a zero-day status for roughly two days last week, was exploited in a hacker attack targeting the...

Cybercrime

As it evolves, web3 will contain and increase all the security issues of web2 – and perhaps add a few more.

Cybercrime

Luxury retailer Neiman Marcus Group informed some customers last week that their online accounts had been breached by hackers.

Cybercrime

Zendesk is informing customers about a data breach that started with an SMS phishing campaign targeting the company’s employees.

Cybercrime

Patch Tuesday: Microsoft calls attention to a series of zero-day remote code execution attacks hitting its Office productivity suite.

Artificial Intelligence

The release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022 has demonstrated the potential of AI for both good and bad.

Cybercrime

Satellite TV giant Dish Network confirmed that a recent outage was the result of a cyberattack and admitted that data was stolen.