The Hacker Hack the Facebook In 2020

• Ø  Have you heard of Virtual Bagel?

Their Facebook page has over 4,000 likes. They use the page to market their brilliant business model 'we send you bagels via the net -- just download and revel in.' It feels like a joke, and it is, sort of. This page was founded by BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones in 2012. He wanted to seek out what's the price of a like on a Facebook page, so he bought some likes for Virtual Bagel. Now there are two ways to shop for 'likes', the legitimate way, and also the illegitimate way. The illegitimate way is to travel to a web site like BoostLikes.com to get some likes. You'll be able to get 1000 for $70.

 

 Sites like these use click farms in developing countries like India, the Philippines, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Egypt, Indonesia, and Bangladesh. Here employees are routinely paid just 1 dollar per thousand clicks of the form button. So Facebook explicitly forbids buying like this manner. Instead, they provide the 'legitimate' thanks to buying likes by advertising your page. Prominently displayed may be a link to "Get more likes" with the promise: "Connect with more of the people that touch on you." And this can be how Virtual Bagel got its 4000likes. Rory Cellan-Jones paid 100 dollars to Facebook and also the likes rolled in. He targeted his ad to the United Kingdom and therefore the U. S., but also countries like Egypt, Indonesia, and therefore the Philippines.

• Ø  Now, where does one think Virtual Bagel was most popular?

 I'll offer you a touch, it wasn't the US or the United Kingdom. But within days he had over 1600 likes mostly from developing countries. Now what was more problematic was the folks that followed Virtual Bagel looked suspicious. For instance, there was one Cairo-based follower whose name was Ahmed Ronaldo. His profile consisted almost exclusively of images of Cristiano Ronaldo and he liked 3,000 pages. Cellan-Jones also observed that his new throng of fans was particularly disengaged, even as you'd imagine those from a click-farm would be. But he hadn't hired a click-farm, he had obtained Facebook ads. This story was reported in July 2012. In August, Facebook reported it had identified and deleted 83 million fake accounts (that was 9% of the whole at the time). This resulted in noticeable drops for popular singers and celebrities. 

•    So did they delete all of the fake likes?
• Nope, not even close. I do know because most of the likes on my Facebook pages aren't genuine.

In May 2012, I received several emails from Facebook offering me $50 worth of free promotion of my page, which at the time had only 2,000 likes. My Website had twenty times that following so I believed surely this free 'paid' promotion could help me reach more of the folks that mattered to me. And immediately I could see results. Within some days my likes had tripled, and that they kept on growing, thousands per day. And after some months, I had about 70,000Facebook likes, which matched my Website subscribers at the time. Now what was weird was my post on Facebook didn't seem to be getting from now on engagement than once I had 2,000. If anything, they were getting less engagement. I didn't understand why at the time, but I’ve got since realized it's because most of these likes I used to be gaining through Facebook ads weren't from those who were genuinely fascinated by Veritasium.

• All of you think that, How do I know?

Well, because fake likes behave very differently from real followers. Have a glance at this graph of the engagement of my Facebook followers. Here I'm plotting countries as bubbles, so this can be Canada and therefore the size represents the number of likes I've received from that country. So this is often the U. S., it is a nice big bubble. Now I'm ranking these countries on the horizontal-axis supported what percentage of these likes have engaged with my page this month. So as you'll be able to see roughly 30% Canadians and Americans have engaged with my page, but they are not as active because the Germans where over 40% of my likes have engaged, and that they aren't as active because the Austrians a tiny low but passionate group of Veritasium fans at nearly 60% These are all of the opposite Western countries. So you'll see that it's normal for between 25% and 35% of my page likes to have interaction with my page each month. Now here is Egypt, where but 1% of my likes have engaged with my page.

 

 Now, this is often India, the Philippines, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. That's an enormous following, but no engagement. Together all of those countries conjure 80,000 likes, that's roughly 75% of the entire likes had before the last video. And these are the profiles that followed me after I use Facebook advertising and that they are worse than useless. Here's why: once you make a post, Facebook distributes it to a tiny low fraction of the people that like your page just to determine their reaction. If they engage with it by liking, commenting, and sharing then Facebook distributes the post to more of your likes and even their friends. Now if you somehow accumulate fake likes, Facebook's initial distribution goes resolute fewer real fans, and thus it receives less engagement, then consequently you reach a smaller number of individuals.

 

 That's how a rising number of fans may result in a very call engagement. And from this Facebook makes money twice over-- once to assist you to acquire new fans, so again after you try and reach them. I mean your organic reach is also so restricted by the dearth of engagement that your only option is to pay to market the post. What's worse, there are no thanks to deleting fake likes in bulk -- all you'll do is target posts around them. And that I should re-iterate I never bought fake likes. I used Facebook's legitimate advertising, but the results are as if I had bought fake likes from a click farm. Now you may think the answer to any or all this is often just to exclude countries with click-farms from your ad campaigns. But unfortunately, the matter goes much deeper. Meet Virtual Cat, a virtual pet like none other. Its page is committed to supplying only the worst, most annoying drivel you'll imagine. Only an idiot would love this page. And that is not just my opinion, that's actually what it says within the page description. And that I should know because I wrote it. I created this page yesterday and that I then paid $10 to advertise the page through Facebook targeted only to cat-lovers within the US, Canada, Australia, and the UK.

 

 Now I expected that because I had excluded all of the large click-farm countries and since the page is so terrible that I basically wouldn't get any likes. But within 20 minutes I had blown through my whole budget and that I got 39 likes. So who are these people liking a blank page and costing me25 cents the piece? All of the profiles were all from the places I had targeted, mostly the US, but there was something strange about them. All of those people liked plenty of things, like hundreds and thousands of things. And plenty of the items they liked were odd too. Like in one account this person liked T-mobile, AT & amp; T and Verizon. They liked Jeep and Lexus and Mercedes and Volvo and Volkswagon. They like everything. Other accounts I saw, they liked the kitchen scrubbers and that they liked mouthwash.

 

• Ø  You know, who reports that on their Facebook page?

 It just baffles me. Therefore the real mystery to me is why someone, somewhere would click on ads they didn't care about without making money from them. I mean I do not think these likes came from bots - they're too easy to spot and eliminate. I also don't think for a second Facebook would pay click-farms to click on those ads to get revenue for them, so it looks as if a mystery. And then, during this article, I found what I feel is the most reasonable hypothesis. Click-farms click the ads free. To avoid detection by Facebook's fraud algorithms, they like pages apart from those they need been purchased to look more genuine. I mean you'll be able to imagine 1000 likes on a selected page coming from one geographical region during a short period would appear suspicious. But buried in a very torrent of other 'like' activity? They might be impossible to spot. So workers at these click-farms will click anything.

• Ø  I mean where does one thing, Facebook's Security page is most popular?

• ·         Dhaka, Bangladesh.

 

• Ø  What about Google?

• ·         Dhaka.

 

• Ø  What about soccer star David Beckham?

It's actually Cairo, but you're making my point. So wherever you're targeting, advertising your page on Facebook could be a waste of cash. I wish Facebook would remove the fake likes from my page and every one the others. But that may mean admitting that they need generated significant ad revenue from clicks that weren't genuine, which then suppressed the reach of pages who had an occasional engagement, forcing those pages to pay again to achieve inauthentic fans that the truth is Facebook benefits by maintaining this establishment because the truth is nobody likes these many things.

• And Last Do you have heard about the Some Common Facebook Scams?
• Let me tell you the 4 common Facebook scams-

Fake Links/ClickJacking – Fake news, free giveaways, etc. can be delivery methods for malware. Just like email scams of the past, these leverage stories, news, or offers that catch your attention. The point is to have you click on a link or share something that propagates malware. 

Examples include:

• Direct Messages with links or attempts to get you to look at something.
• Links resulting in another login request for Facebook/Email Provider – this is to harvest your account.
• Surveys – Some surveys on Facebook are created to harvest information about users for identity theft/account hijacking/spear-phishing (crafted attacks).

Fake Accounts – Fake Facebook accounts can fall into many different types of scams. 

Examples include:

• Account Cloning – I’ve seen this approach grow in frequency in the last year. Indications of a cloned account are a second Facebook Friend Request – if you’re already connected on Facebook, you should not receive a second Facebook Friend Request. The old email trick – “I’m in jail in a foreign country, can you send money?” has migrated to Facebook with a different twist. 
• Friend of Friend/Relative – Some fake accounts are created and operated to entice you to trust them. Within a short period of time, they promise money or ask for it. Many scams revolve around large sums of money if you provide a fee or personal data.
• Romance – Another common scam is requests to “be friends” or “…get to know you”. I’ve seen many people fall for these accounts. They can be grouped into two primary categories:
• For the Lulz – Some people create and operate fake accounts for their own personal needs or dysfunctions. They may not ask for money and simply crave attention. I’ve seen men pretend to be women and women pretend to be men in the digital world. 
• For the Money - These scammers are versed in spending time to build up a dependency.  They may send you small amounts of money to build up their credibility. Eventually, it leads to needing money from you. Once this starts, they go for everything they can get.  Many of these scammers know how to pull your heartstrings to get what they want. 

Your Employer – Sometimes it’s not about exploiting you, but who you work for. Cisco’s 2016 Annual Security Report listed malware delivered via Facebook scams as a top delivery method to compromise organizational networks. Great cybersecurity measures are easily compromised by enticing someone to click a link at work. Some employers block Facebook for these specific reasons. 

After you were thinking about Protecting Yourself from these Scams?

* There are some key steps to protect yourself:- 

• Setup Security – Many people think their accounts are secure and details are hidden. Many people lockdown their posts, but leave photographs, check-ins, etc. open. These are all great data sources for scammers to use against you. Lock everything down and test the setup. Open only the functions that you need to. (If you have security-minded friends or family, ask them for help. Sometimes a second set of eyes spot missed settings.)

• Real World Suspicion – If you wouldn’t do it in the physical world, don’t do it in the digital world. If you met someone on the street who said they lived in your neighborhood 20 years ago and ten minutes later asks for your Social Security Number to give you $2000, you’d be suspicious. You should use the same scrutiny and judgment, and more so, in the digital world. Just because someone says something is true, does not mean it is. It just means they said it. “Never assume anything is true until you verify it yourself.” If it sounds too good to be true, 99% of the time, it is not true.  Be cautious.