Be Warned – Facebook Ad Leads to Dangerous Site

I was about to take a quiz on Facebook last night ( ARE YOU DUMB ?! – http://xrl.in/1vyw ) and before doing so I looked over the page and I noticed the following at the bottom.

Now I was certain that Rhian had not had anything to do with it, and I very rarely click on random ads, but this appeared to be Facebook related and I was curious about the IQ quiz so I clicked on continue, the site quizyou.net loaded, I clicked on next and fortunately I got the following warning from WOT (Web Of Trust Firefox add-on). WARNING! This site has a poor reputation. Trustworthiness > Poor, Vendor reliability > Poor, Privacy > Poor, Child safety > Very poor.

I decided to investigate a little further (as I always do to decide for myself) so I viewed WOT’s Security Scorecard for quizyou.net and saw this, “Warning! This site is rated as dangerous”.
46 people marked quizyou.net as “Fraud, scam, phishing”, and 8 for browser exploit.
I was convinced that the site was dangerous but I wanted to get a second opinion from another reputable security agency for argument sake and so I ran quizyou.net through McAfee’s SiteAdviser service and they reported the following. “We tested this site and didn’t find any significant problems.” However, in the comments below that in the User Review Summary for quizyou.net you’ll see that 5 reviewers marked quizyou.net as Phishing or other scams, and one as Browser exploit (out of 8 reviewers, one was missing, the other didn’t matter).
As you can imagine, McAfee’s SiteAdviser service has lost all credibility with me as did their other security products years ago.

Refreshing the page that the ARE YOU DUMB quiz is on doesn’t load a new ad, it loads a slight variation of the same ad every time that is displayed at both the top and bottom of the page.

While I entrust my life to Firefox due to its unsurpassed security features, I still try and take extra precautions and obviously in this case, it was a good thing that I did. No matter how secure you think that you are and how secure your browser is, it can take one click to ruin it all for you.
At last that I knew, there were more than 64 million web sites online and so I can’t imagine any single precaution, software, or service that can protect you on every site and from people insistent upon stealing, destroying, and exploiting your personal information and data. It takes a combination of things to stay safe.

If you ever come across such sites, you can help us all to be safe by using Firefox’s Report Web Forgery tool. While on the site in question go to, Help > Report Web Forgery… It takes just seconds to do.

So now you know. Be careful but more than anything, be prepared.
I can’t imagine how and/or why Facebook isn’t aware of this site that Facebook is generating revenue from. My social life and interests are spread across several communities and because of that, my friends are spread out so please pass this along to your friends and hopefully along the way it will grab Facebook’s attention and they’ll address this particular issue and prevent it from happening again.

Thanks so much for your time.
Ken

WOT (Web Of Trust) is a free Internet security addon for your browser. It will keep you safe from online scams, identity theft, spyware, spam, viruses and unreliable shopping sites. WOT warns you before you interact with a risky website.

http://www.mywot.com

WOT

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3456

Furthermore, protect yourself from visiting the same dangerous site again.
Create a blacklist, simple to use, access settings via Tools > FoxFilter Preferences
FoxFilter 6.0

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4351

FoxFilter 7.0 (Latest)

http://inspiredeffect.com/FoxFilter/

Related Pics
WOT-Warning for QuizYou.net

http://www.accessfirefox.org/KS_Cell/Facebook/WOT-Warning.png

QuizYou.net Home Page

http://www.accessfirefox.org/KS_Cell/Facebook/QuizYou-net-Home-Page.png

QuizYou.net Ad, top and bottom of page

http://www.accessfirefox.org/KS_Cell/Facebook/QuizYou.net-Ad-Full-Page.png

——————————————-
We’re Green!
Comments are turned off to conserve energy however,
Trackbacks and Pingbacks are environmentally friendly.