Think twice before playing quiz on Facebook

Two years back, you might have seen most of your friends in Facebook were playing quiz on Facebook. Those days, you would not know the effects of playing such games on Facebook. Today, Facebook sued two Ukrainian developers who creates these quiz app on Facebook.

The Facebook user’s private data was collected using the quiz app created by the developers. After collecting the users private data, they inject advertisements into the users News Feed. Both the developers known as Gleb Sluchevsky and Andrey Gorbachov were accused by Facebook of performing hacking activities on the users.

These developers have attracted the users to install some malicious browser plugins. Some of you might play the game “character and popularity” tests where you have to answer a few questions at the end it will tell about your character. You might be thinking this is a fun game, but this is the quiz game which has infected 63,000 Facebook users browsers. The developer’s main target was Russian and Ukranian users.

How the hackers gather your private information?

So how do they really get the users private details? At first, the user will log in into the web app using their Facebook login using the Facebook login feature. Once u click the button, they will show a message where the developer promised to collect only limited information. After that, they will direct the user to install the malicious plugin into your web browser as an extension. If you were unlucky and you installed the extension, you have already given access to the hackers to access to your Facebook private data. A note to that, not only Facebook was compromised other social network were infected too.

According to Facebook, the scheme would not have worked if they had not approved the hackers as developers. On 2016 and 2018, the hackers have registered under the name of “Elena Stelmah” and “Amanda Pitt”. Facebook has discovered this scheme “through an investigation of malicious extensions”. Knowing it, they have suspended both these accounts and contacted the browser makers to make sure the hackers application were completely removed.

Last week, Facebook has also sued four Chinese companies who sold fake Facebook accounts. These cases has gave Facebook a chance to defend themselves against charges with lack of privacy and security. Next time, as a user you should think twice before playing those games on Facebook. You can be the next victim.