More Facebook users hit by “distracting beach babes”

Sophos is warning Facebook users to be on their guard, after an attack this weekend designed to infect computers with adware.  Hundreds of thousands of Facebook users are thought to have been hit by the attack which posted a fake video to profiles entitled “distracting beach babes”.

The malicious posts, which were made to appear as if they were coming from users’ friends on Facebook, read:

Accompanying the messages was a movie thumbnail of a woman in a bikini.  However, Sophos experts warn that clicking on the movie’s thumbnail doesn’t play a video, but takes victims to a rogue Facebook application that informs users that they do not have the right player software installed, and tries to trick them into installing revenue-generating adware.

The rogue Facebook application then posts the same message to users’ Facebook friends, spreading the video link across the social network.  Sophos estimates that hundreds of thousands of Facebook users found themselves under attack this weekend, echoing a similar scam that spread on Facebook last weekend involving the sharing of a fake video entitled “sexiest video ever”.