La capsula Informativa: Phishing Out the Truth: Facebook Scams & Threatening Notifications

Thinking your Facebook business account has been reported because it violated a community guideline and risks suspension or deletion is pure nightmare fuel for communicators. Cyber security threats are on the rise. and it’s becoming more common to receive these types of alerts on personal and professional pages. Before you panic, first pause and investigate a bit further.

In the past week, you’ve probably received an email, text and/or phone call from a person (or robot!) claiming to be someone they aren’t to trick you into directly or indirectly sharing sensitive information. Unfortunately, Facebook has proved to be an ideal playing ground for these bad actors.

Facebook phishing often involves fake security alerts and password reset requests to redirect their targets to a phishing site aimed at stealing credentials and other information. Although it’s a direct violation of Facebook’s guidelines, it’s easy for bad actors to set up fraudulent accounts under the guise of a Facebook authority and use it to trick unsuspecting account administrators into providing sensitive information or clicking harmful links.

In fact, we’ve seen a major uptick in the number of Facebook messages our clients have been receiving in recent months from fraudulent “community standards/support/etc.” accounts accusing their pages of being disabled, violating community guidelines and more. We’ve also noticed the attempts are getting more convincing – something that can even trip up those who exercise cyber security best practices.

Regardless of how savvy Facebook scammers get, there are several things you can do to outsmart them and prevent stress, financial loss and/or other issues for yourself, your clients or your organization. Read on to discover our agency’s process against Facebook scams and phishing/malware attempts, how we decipher legitimate notifications and how we stay smart on cyber security threats to keep our clients and agency safe.

Stress is a natural response to receiving an alarming alert on Facebook. You may wonder, “Is this my fault?” or “Was my team not careful with the content that was posted?” and it may compel you to try and fix the issue before a client, manager or team member sees it. It’s important to get a second eye before performing any sort of action (plus, transparency is always the best policy!). This is why it’s so important to pause, look a bit deeper into the message and consider what may have warranted this type of message.

At Franco, we provide counsel to clients if they need help determining whether a Facebook message or notification is legit – even if we are not supporting their social media program. We are passionate about supporting everyone’s online safety education.

One way we nurture our own team’s cyber security knowledge is through required monthly KnowBe4 training courses. KnowBe4 is the world’s largest integrated platform for security awareness training combined with simulated phishing attacks.

One of the most powerful things we’ve taken from KnowBe4 is the reminder to stop, look and think.