facebook-small-logoFacebook most recently came under an e-mail phishing attack. It is feared that many users of the social networking site might have clicked on a false web link in an Facebook message sent to them.The fraudulent link when clicked took users away from the real Facebook to a fake Facebook site. In the fake site, users were asked to login again, which obviously required the users to enter their password again, with high probability of those passwords being captured by individuals behind this nasty scheme.

In response to this, Facebook blocked all those emails which had the false link. These emails were blocked within the first few hours just after they were sent. Good news for those who became victim of this undesirable scheme: Facebook has automatically reset their passwords. Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt went on to explain the rationale behind this move:

so that any data the bad guys have becomes useless very quickly.

The victims of this attack would be receiving an email from Facebook that will inform them about their passwords been reset.

This scheme grew rapidly since the compromised accounts went on to send hundreds of messages to others containing essentially the same subject and link.According to Schnitt, it is a bit early to provide an exact figure of the people that were affected by this. Schnitt explained how Facebook countered this attack:

We blocked the (fake) URL and that messages that were being sent.Then we went into inboxes and walls and deleted that content…Even if you (now have) one of these messages in your account, by the time you try to go to it, it will either be deleted, or when you click on the URL, it won’t take you anywhere.

Schnitt urged the users to be a little bit more careful when they see such strange links. He said:

The other thing they should be is generally suspicious.Why is my friend sending me this link, why is my friend using broken English, what is this URL? Those are red flags. Those URLs (Web site addresses) weren’t common URLS. Those should all be red flags for users.