The malware acts without the victims' knowledge, putting "likes" on behalf of hackers to pages or other content on the social
Faceliker, a malware that can manipulate likes on Facebook, is starting to be scary again. According to what has been discovered by McAfee, a company expert in computer security, the infection is back again to spread on the social network. The malware, in fact, has been detected many times in the last period.
In particular, according to McAfee, Faceliker spread suddenly increased especially in the second quarter of 2017. It is a click-jacker, a malware that aims to alter the number of likes on Facebook. The goal of hackers, who resort to this family of viruses, is to highlight a certain web page on the social or give relevance, for example, to fake news. Faceliker, once penetrated on the victims' devices, remotely from a server releases "likes" to the content reported by the cyber criminals.
How Faceliker strikes
The modus operandi of Faceliker follows the one used by most malware. In fact, the virus depends on the unintentional cooperation of users, who must first download the infected extension into their browsing programs. Victims are reportedly taken to the malicious pages, from which the dangerous extension is downloaded, through links that arrive in the email or directly on Facebook Messenger.
In particular, it seems that the virus mainly affects Google Chrome. The ploy used by Faceliker is really insidious. It may happen that victims do not notice anything. The virus, as you have seen, likes pages or content according to the hacker's "instructions".
How to protect yourself
The first important thing to do is not to click on links of dubious origin, whether they arrive via email or Facebook Messenger. If you recently noticed something strange in your account - for example, you don't remember liking a certain page - take a look at the extensions in your browser and delete any suspicious ones.