For the past few years, I’ve been documenting, screenshotting, and sharing examples of criminal campaigns on the three big social media platforms: Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. I’m not that interested in speculating whether or not something is fake content, falsely amplified by nation-state sponsored threat actors (i.e. coordinated inauthentic behavior), but instead I’ve been focusing on two (a lot less media-sexy) themes:
- low-tier criminals using these platforms to promote their services
- so called “support scams” targeting mainly Facebook page owners
What is common across these two is the fact that they keep getting through social media platforms’ automatic filtering. I call this filtering – the good-willed type, not the censorship type – social media countermeasures. A term I think I picked up from Destin who runs Smarter Every Day YouTube channel, but I haven’t really seen it used. In a nutshell, social media platforms are trying to create countermeasures to prevent malicious behavior on their platform, and at the same time cyber criminals are developing counter-countermeasures to bob and weave their way around detection and filtering. Sometimes these criminals simply operate in a grey area not covered explicitly by a platform’s Terms of Service, making developing effective countermeasures even harder. Let’s take a look at few examples.
Continue reading “Social Media Countermeasures – Battling Long-Running Scams on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram”
Joel Latto 