Girl finds dead mother hawking cure-all on Facebook

[Canuckistan]

Helen Breimer died of cancer nine months ago, but after someone hacked her Facebook account, her image started showing up promoting a colon cleanser

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/...rticle1320524/

[lynnejanet]

One of my fb friends had her profile hacked by the same company. She isn't on very often and had no idea. Facebook contacted her, and shut down her profile completely. She has to start from scratch.

[Canuckistan]

Anybody else feel like visiting the company's head offices?

[James G]

Also had a friend who had the same thing happen. If it is happening with dead people, it disturbingly suggests hacking, rather than simple phishing, unless someone still had access to the account to maintain it.

[Alchemy]

Originally Posted by James G

Also had a friend who had the same thing happen. If it is happening with dead people, it disturbingly suggests hacking, rather than simple phishing, unless someone still had access to the account to maintain it.

People tend to use only one or two passwords for everything they do online and that's been the cause of the last few significant Facebook compromises I know about. You don't need to hack a Facebook account to get into it; you find all the other websites that person has ever registered for and hope that (1) one of them has an unpatched vulnerability you can exploit to extract login information, and (2) that password (or an obvious variation of it) is the same as that person uses for Facebook.

I strongly suspect there's a lot of pseudo-phishing going on as well, where websites (usually offering torrents of porn or cracked software, as that'll get you the most fish) ask for registration information, and whatever username/password the person gives are tested against a list of target websites.