Who blocked you from his friend list?

I appologize for this screenshot being so messed up, I was using the snipping tool for it to hide the names of infected people and it got really buggy.

If you get an invite to this "event" don't even bother opening it, it's a scam. Just like the "Nastiest Girl" scam it it redirects your browser a few times takes you to install a malicious app.

This app grabs your profile info and asks for the permission to create events on your behalf.

one of the malicious apps that this event links to, look at the permissions it asks for.

What this app then does is spam your friends with these fake events until all of your friends finally fall for the scam and this app spreads virally filling everyones event inbox's with complete junk. It is unknown what the app does with your personal information, it may store it somewhere, sell it, or be used for other scams.

OMG Watch the Nastiest Girl Fight Video Ever

A Scam has popped up now taking advantage of people who don't realize the difference between apps and Events on Facebook. This scam spreads by people "attending" and inviting others to attend the event. This event spreads virally just like all of the other scams I've reviewed.

The Event page looks like this:

As pictured the profile picture for this event displays a picture of a girl with a play button over her. This is not a real video, it is simply just a picture on the event page. Users fall prey to the scam by clicking the link posted in the description of the event. Installing and giving a malicious app permissions over their account.

Some users, not all, claim that they do see a video after clicking the link. These people may be trolls, they also may be fake accounts created by the scammer to try to convince people to click the link.

If someone were really trying to show you some nasty video, they would show it to you on youtube or another popular online video service. Don't fall for these scams.

Best Friend Detector/BFF finder/Who are your best friends?

This is a fairly new trend of app. What this app does is claim that if you use it, it will attempt to identify your best friends. Now right off the bat you know it's not going to be accurate because they can't read your mind. But most of these apps are actually viral apps that don't do anything more than pull a random amount of friends from your list of friends and spit them out claiming them as your best friends.

The "good" best friend apps are ones that actually take wall posts and other things into account. Unfortunately though most of them don't.

So.... they're sort of fake apps.... they're poor quality.

So why would I post about em since again everyone knows they're not psychic?
Because these apps tend to ask for rediculous permissions from you such as access to your email, access to your friends information(beyond just their names and profile pic) they ask for your non basic information, the right to post on your wall and the ability to access your data without you being logged in. These apps shouldn't need as much as they ask for. All they should need is your basic information which includes friend names and their profile photos. Some request access to view your wall, that's a reasonable request because some of them actually use your wall data to weigh who are your better friends, to make them more accurate than just random guesses. Don't expect much out of them still.

tl;dr: Best Friend apps tend to ask for ridiculous permissions. Check em before you install.

You give apps a lot of power over your information and your friends and you probably don't even realize it

When you install an app to your Facebook account do you read over what the permissions that app asks for?

If you're like most users you instinctively click allow without reading what the app wants.

The above is an example permissions page. Many apps now days request permission to post to your wall, some request permission to view posts on your wall, some request  permission to access your profile information at any time of their choosing. Some request access to your friends information.

What you don't realize is not only did you just give a company or person all of your personal information photos videos, access to your profiles wall(which your friends and apps have posted to) but you gave them access to your friends profiles. You gave them access to post messages on your behalf.

You gave all of that away for free.
Just for an app where you get to have your own little virtual cafe where every type of food you make shockingly takes more than a few hours to make causing you to come back to facebook every day just to make sure you cook this virtual food to your virtual customers for your virtual currency which you can spend to make more virtual food for your virtual customers.

So does that mean you can't install tons of fun cool apps and games? not at all. Here's what you need to do. Think about what is necessary for the game to run.

Generally Games ask for permission to view who your friends are and your basic personal information(gender, name, etc.). Facebook throws all of that under "Basic Information".

Why do games want to know who your friends are? Easy, that way they can get you to invite your friends so they can "help" you in the game. It's also common for games to request permission to post to your wall. Unless you really want ads to be posted on your wall, I suggest either not adding this app or as soon as you install it disable the posting to wall feature.

tl;dr: Lesson: Read the permissions you give apps before you install them. Otherwise you're probably giving them more than you realize.

Thanks for reading! :)

See who looks at your profile/how many times has your profile been viewed?

There has been a scam around lately where supposedly if you added an app it would let you view who looks at your Facebook profile.

Some apps even claim if you add their app you can see how many times your profile has been viewed.

These are complete scams. The only people who could tell you that information is Facebook. Why? because the code required to count as well as see who's looking at your profile, has to be on your profile since it's creation. That code is not there. Before Facebook revamped their profile pages again you used to see thousands of apps with crap all over your page. Those apps still could not identify which friends visited your page, they could however count how many page visits you got, they were incredibly inaccurate though. Facebook no longer has that same system though. No apps can count how many friends view your profile or which ones are doing it.

These scams are usually survey scams and are viral, they tend to post messages to your wall without you knowing.

Girl killed herself, after her dad posted this to her wall -scam app

This is probably the worst of all of the Facebook scams I've seen. You may have actually seen this one floating around Fbook yourself. Basically the app uses phrases like "Girl killed herself, after her dad posted this to her wall". The app posts to users walls sentences like that in hopes of getting someone to click the link. Once you click the link there are a few things that will happen, they will try to trick you into liking their page, get you to fill out a survey(it earns them money), collect your personal information, as well as exploit Facebook Connect, One friend I've seen has had the malicious exploit send messages to all of his friends. Now all of his friends have the same problem. You can fix this issue however.

One of the Facebook pages it tries to get you to "like"

If you or a friend fell prey to this scam you can fix the problem. Unfortunately though if you gave them your personal info, they will still have it(there is no way to change that). This video provided by Sophos will teach you how to fix the issue.

Welcome to Safebook

I'm just getting going but I think this site will help many many people. The focus of this blog is security on the web. Facebook is one site I plan to talk about a lot, seeing how every week I see a new scam show up on Facebook. I plan to teach you how to spot scams on the internet, as well as spot malicious Facebook apps.

In-fact on the right side of this blog there's a ticker for malicious Facebook apps. The goal is, if you see it mentioned here, you wont add it on Facebook. You can also check whether an app is malicious by visiting this site.

I plan to have a simple way for you to submit apps for review for this list but for now, it's up to me.