The desire to get an answer for all the above questions make many of the Facebook users fall victims to software that promises them to fulfill their task. Cyber criminals often make use of this weakness and create malicious programs to target larger audience. Let’s take a look at the reality of one such cleverly designed software that fools the Facebook users making them believe that it is genuine. UnfriendAlert, a free application that sends alerts whenever you are removed from the Facebook friend list, has been found gathering the Facebook users’ credentials. Users of the UnfriendAlert have been cautioned by the Security researchers at Malwarebytes saying that the malicious app asks the users to login with their Facebook credentials to activate monitoring of unfriends and notify service for your Facebook profile. For third party applications, Facebook has provided API OAuth login system, wherein users need not provide their Facebook credentials to them. So, in any case, one should never submit their Facebook password to any desktop software or a third party service. Once you enter your login credentials, UnfriendAlert will send it to the website “yougotunfriended.com” owned by attackers. UnfriendAlert was also classified as potentially unwanted program (PUP) late last month. The reason being that it often shows unnecessary advertisements and shrewdly installs other free apps and malicious software when visiting some web pages in your Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer, making you fail to block them. Also, the application does not show up in the list of Apps on users’ Facebook page, so one may easily forget that something or someone could be observing or maybe even using the Facebook account. So users are recommended to remove this potentially unwanted program and change your Facebook password. To do this, you first need to go to “Settings”. Then, go to “Password” and use the “Edit” link to change the password. Later, choose the option to log out of other devices just in case the account is open somewhere else. Go to the option to “Secure your account” and review the changes that were made. Check that you were the one that made those changes. To sum it up, it is always better to do some research on the third party applications before installing them, as one mistake could lead to you compromising your online security and privacy in various ways. Resource : Malwarebytes.
