Malware This article is more than 9 years old

Is there a Rihanna sex tape? No, it's a malware scam on Facebook

This article is more than 9 years old

But it’s not as popular as the fake app pretending to tell you who’s been peeking at your profile

There is no sex tape of Rihanna and her boyfriend doing the rounds online. You can’t see who’s been looking at your Facebook profile. And you can’t change your Facebook colour either.

This may all sound obvious, but according to antivirus firm Bitdefender, these are the most popular malware scams on the social network in 2014.

The company has published a list of the top 10 Facebook scams, with the fake app promising to tell you your Facebook views and visitors by far the most popular, accounting for 30.2% of bogus links it identified on the social network this year.

Clicking on any of them will lead Facebook users to sites that try to install viruses on their computers, as malware developers continue to seek new ways to spread their software to unsuspecting victims.

The chart is good news for Taylor Swift and Disneyland, who both featured in Bitdefender’s list a year ago. Swift’s non-existent sex tape and an offer of a free trip to Disneyland have fallen from the top 10 over the last 12 months.

“Why do people still want to see who has been taking a peek at their profile, despite all security warnings? I think they believe these are legitimate apps,” said chief security strategist Catalin Cosoi.

“This is social engineering at its finest – a challenging mental game that pushes the right psychological buttons. The baits have changed over time, with stalkers, peekers, admirers, overly attached girlfriends and exes haunting you, but the reason this scam works is simple: human nature.”

As with much news of this type, the company responsible for the research also has a commercial agenda: Bitdefender has its own Facebook app that alerts people to potentially-fraudulent posts.

The threat is real, however: Facebook’s sheer size – it had 1.32 billion active users in the second quarter of 2014 – makes it an obvious target for malware developers hoping to infect gullible users.

The full list of popular Facebook scams is below: suffice to say, if you see any of these sentences appear in your news feed, clicking on them would be an extremely bad idea.

Top 10 Facebook scams, 2014

1. Total profile views/visitors – 30.20%

2. Change your Facebook Color/Colour – 7.38%

3. Rihanna sex tape with her boyfriend – 4.76%

4. Check my status update to get free Facebook T-shirt – 4.21%

5. Say goodbye to Blue Facebook – 2.76%

6. Unsealed. We are giving them away for free – 2.41%

7. Check if a friend has deleted you – 2.27%

8. See your top 10 profile peekers here! – 1.74%

9. Find out how to see who viewed your profile – 1.55%

10. Just changed my Facebook theme. It’s amazing – 1.50%

If you see these knickers in your Facebook feed, don’t click

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