Application security

74 Facebook groups for cybercriminals found

There are Facebooks groups for moms, people who like trains, or old photographs of Chicago so it should come as no surprise that cybercriminals also use the social media network to discuss what they like.

Cisco Talos found 74 Facebook groups with more than 385,000 members with dedicated to acts ranging from shady to illegal.

“In all, Talos has compiled a list of 74 groups on Facebook whose members promised to carry out an array of questionable cyber dirty deeds, including the selling and trading of stolen bank/credit card information, the theft and sale of account credentials from a variety of sites, and email spamming tools and services,” wrote Talos’ Jon Munshaw and Jaeson Schultz.

The group names certainly gave away what was taking place inside. Munshaw and Schultz found those named Spam Professional, Spammer & Hacker Professional,"Buy Cvv On THIS SHOP PAYMENT BY BTC" and "Facebook hack (Phishing).

The Talos duo also found Facebook makes it quite simple for any prospective malicious actor to find these groups. As with any point of interest placed into the site’s search function, Facebook takes note and then begins recommending additional, similar sites.

The Talos team initially tried to remove the groups using Facebook’s reporting system, but when did thi not work well it contacted the site’s security team and the majority of the sites were taken down.

“However new groups continue to pop up, and some are still active as of the date of publishing. Talos continues to cooperate with Facebook to identify and take down as many of these groups as possible,” Talos said.

Facebook has been having a tough week. On April 2 it was reported that two Facebook app developers had left 540 million records unprotected on an Amazon S3 bucket.

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