So I discovered something weird and this is the first place I thought to go. So I have uploaded 3 pictures. In the first picture there is a facebook post, directing to the second picture. If you notice in the second picture, the link is not for Forbes, is something else. When I click on the Forbes logo, on picture 2, I get redirected to picture 3, which is definitely not Forbes main website.
Wtf ? Is Facebook on this ? Do they allow stuff like that?
Pretty easy to fake a website so this doesn’t surprise me they used Forbes. I’d be very instrested to see the ncap files for the request you made for those urls. Might find their intentions. Facebook has tons of these. I’ve definitely been redirected to a fake site from FB. They use them to harvest creds, cookies, and other things.
I wish I could have saved those links, because I don’t have the skills to research this anomaly. Maybe if I check my history I can’t post them and maybe somebody here can further analyze them.
I’m in school starting out in cyber security so things like this are a good learning experience. I’ll dig into them a bit and report back on what I find in a few days
There’s a ton of “news outlets” not actually doing journalism but copy and pasting things into a collage of stuff, and adding stuff alongside. Usually it’s an algorithm that scrapes other websites and posts drafts for humans to lightly edit. In this case, it looks like even more of a rip off, and you might call it “generated content”.
So you have bunslover making a post on Facebook referring to a low quality webpage. How is that a Facebook problem. Is the page harmful? Is it designed to trick users to see ads any more than a typical “news outlet” site?
Oh don’t get me wrong, I agree with you it’s scamy. But, 99%+ of internet pages are not original content (regardless of quality) and are one kind of spam or seo trickery or another.
My implied question was:
What would you expect Facebook does?
…or what kind of recourse would you expect anyone(who?) to take regarding that website?
The URL under the ad is clearly not Forbes.
When clicked, the URL in the address is not obfuscated, it simply does not match the content.
That should just be a Nope, and close the tab.
One might genuinely be interested in a site called coolsouvenirs, but if you visit the site, and it did Not contain souvenirs (cool or not) then best go back, report the ad as misleading and then move on.
It did not look to directly being a phishing site with a fake login, or obfuscated URL, so I would not knock FB for taking a low quality ad.
I guess this is the first time I noticed something like this coming from a Facebook link. I used to manage some games on Facebook and they were very adamant on what kind of links go in those games, and with this situation I guess I was kind of surprised to see a trick like this run right under Facebook’s nose. I guess it’s not a security threat, I’m just disgusted. Chinese marketing using real brands as leverage on Facebook = big pile of steaming s**t
You would not trust Facebook posts for actual news, it is social media-it is for cat pics from your delinquent auntie.
What are you expecting from the platform? That only legitimate sauces can post Spam? I suspect you need to look elsewhere for your sauce-covered spam. And leave FB for just updates on your nephews recital, or 10 year college reunions.
Do not take face book posts as any legitimate source
Other thing worth noting is the url includes a “fbclid” which “they” (whoever posted it) are using to either track that article and how many clicks, or they are building profiles for people that click on it using a mixture of user agent strings, cookies and that identifier.