I’m getting weird messages on Facebook from my friends — yes, even weirder than usual. Once today I got a “message” and another time a “gift”, and duly informed on both occasions through the Facebook notification bar. Except the link for the “message” and the “gift” were not to another page on facebook.com, but rather to fastredbk.info — specifically to fastredbk.info/lagin.php. The domain was registered on the 1st of September by domainsbyproxy.com, who specifically offer a service to ensure that whoever owns a domain is kept anonymous.
When I clicked on the first “message” I was presented with all sorts of errors, possibly PHP-related ones, but I’m not sure. I don’t think my computer or my account was infected in any way… but then it must be affecting people somehow, so maybe that was just a diversion tactic to lull me into a false sense of security. If it didn’t attack my account, why other people but not me? I’m using Firefox on Linux: could that be related?
I haven’t seen any many other references to this online, so is it just me (always a strong possibility) or did something similar happen to anyone else?
UPDATE: One other blogger has mentioned this (in Swedish) and a couple of comments here have confirmed it. How does it work? Is it dangerous? And is Facebook doing anything to stop it?
FURTHER UPDATE: “curl”-ing to the URL above yields:
Warning: mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (2) in /var/www/lagin.php on line 37
Warning: mysql_select_db() [function.mysql-select-db]: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (2) in /var/www/lagin.php on line 38
Warning: mysql_select_db() [function.mysql-select-db]: A link to the server could not be established in /var/www/lagin.php on line 38
Warning: mysql_query() [function.mysql-query]: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (2) in /var/www/lagin.php on line 39
Warning: mysql_query() [function.mysql-query]: A link to the server could not be established in /var/www/lagin.php on line 39
errorstring(84) "Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (2)"
SELECT a.url, a.template_id
FROM application a
WHERE a.status = 1 AND template_id=7 ORDER BY rand()
LIMIT 1
I don’t know how to quote the original HTML, but the above looks like what I saw earlier, so it was actually MySQL errors that I witnessed. Is it something Facebook can stop?
