Washington Attorney General Rob McKenna is joining with Facebook to launch a public attack on the internet scam known as “click jacking.”
Adscend is the Delaware company behind the so-called click-jacking scam. “Clickjacking” involves computer codes embedded in links that you click on that triggers Facebook’s “Like” feature.
And Attorney General Rob McKenna says it then places provocative booby-trapped messages on your Facebook Wall. The original message gets re-posted to other Facebook Walls, propagating the scheme. Adscend gets commission for all of those clicks.
Craig Clark is Facebook’s lead litigation counsel. He says Adscend works with a network of affiliate spammers to pull off what is estimated to be a 20 million dollar a year business.
“We can and do play whack-a-mole with individual spammers; we sue them we go after them, we stop them. We want to also efficiently target the head of the snake where we can.”
Clark says Facebook launched a fix to combat this particular click-jacking tactic, but new iterations of spam appear all the time. He urges common sense and says if that salacious link doesn’t look like something your friend would send – she probably didn’t.