Facebook, Washington AG join in fight against 'clickjacking'

Washington Attorney General Rob McKenna is joining with Facebook to launch a public attack on the internet scam known as “click jacking.” 

Adscend is the Delaware company behind the so-called click-jacking scam. “Clickjacking” involves computer codes embedded in links that you click on that triggers Facebook’s “Like” feature.

And Attorney General Rob McKenna says it then places provocative booby-trapped messages on your Facebook Wall. The original message gets re-posted to other Facebook Walls, propagating the scheme.  Adscend gets commission for all of those clicks. 

Craig Clark is Facebook’s lead litigation counsel. He says Adscend works with a network of affiliate spammers to pull off what is estimated to be a 20 million dollar a year business.    

“We can and do play whack-a-mole with individual spammers; we sue them we go after them, we stop them.  We want to also efficiently target the head of the snake where we can.”      

Clark says Facebook launched a fix to combat this particular click-jacking tactic, but new iterations of spam appear all the time. He urges common sense and says if that salacious link doesn’t look like something your friend would send – she probably didn’t.