...SeArChInG WaYs To GeT ThErE...

Fed up with keeping Facebook Home page open in your browser all the time just to chat with your Facebook buddeis??? You don't need to do that anymore. Yes, Pidgin community has done it again for you, just for you. Now plug-ins are available to enable Facebook chat on Pidgin, where you can use Facebook chat simply as you use your favorite instant messenger to KIT with your buddies. Here I'm mentioning the plugin I'm using to reach my buddies in Facebook. It's called pidgin-facebookchat. You can easily install it by downloading it into your local hard drive. It is available as a deb for Debian users, as an exe for Windows users and Red Hat users can check the future plans page to check whether the rpm is ready. The installation is really easy. Just double click on the exe or deb you downloaded and add a new account to chat with Facebook buddies by navigating to Accounts > Manage on Pidgin. Click on add tbutton there to add a new account for Facebook chat while selecting Facebook Chat as the protocol. Then you can enter your username (Your e-mail account you use to log in to Facebook) and password to enter facebook. That's all you need. Why wasting your computer resources on browser when you really don't need it? Use Pidgin.

I’m using Facebook for nearly one and half years and I believe you all will agree with me if I say its a great social networking tool for people like us to find our old buddies, who haven’t seen for ages. So now, surfing in Facebook for few hours has become a part of my life style. Yesterday when I was working on one of my projects in early morning, I got a mail message from Facebook saying one of my friends has written something on my Wall. Since I didn’t hear from that friend for some time, I was excited to see what he has written there. Therefore I logged in to Facebook and checked the new wall post I just received. The post said someone has written something interesting about me (funny ;-)) in their blog and my friend has happened to notice that and sent me a Wall post mentioning the blog URL. I was so excited to see what is there inside that blog and I quickly clicked on the blog URL given there, which was http://ceceliacyfehy.blogspot.com/ to see what’s inside. Then a Web page opened up in a new tab, but it was not a blog. Instead a page 100% similar to Facebook login page appeared and asked me to login to Facebook. Since I clicked on the URL received by my friend, I knew that I didn’t make any spelling mistakes when typing the URL on the address bar (Actually I didn’t type anything, I only clicked on the URL I got), which was finally ended up by going to Facebook login page instead of the blog page I wanted to see. Also I knew that I already logged in to Facebook and I don’t need to provide login information again and again since I have correctly logged in to the site once. While thinking what went wrong, I clicked on the URL I got through the Wall post again to view the blog page and it again gave me a page similar to Facebook login page. At this point it came to my mind that this can be an attacker who is trying to hack my Facebook login details by redirecting me to a FAKE Facebook page whenever I clicked on that blog URL, inviting me to login to it by providing my Facebook login information. Therefore I managed to not to give my login details there and I checked the URL appeared on the address bar. Believe me, it was http://faceilbook.com/ very similar to the URL of the official Web site of Facebook which is http://www.facebook.com. Luckily my eyes were vigilant enough to see the difference in the URL appeared on the address bar before I enter my login details, where most people fail. I knew my friend who has sent me this URL with a Wall post has been hacked by someone and I wanted to see what the hacker has done using my friend’s Facebook account. Usually when you go to one of your friends’ page, the recent activities are listed there, so I browsed my friends Facebook account to see what the hacker was doing in the recent past. I was frightened when I saw what he has done using my friends Facebook account. This hacker has sent Wall posts to most of the friends in my friend’s friends list and most of them were again my friends. So I checked some of their profiles to see the Wall posts that they have received by this hacker. All of them have received the same Wall post like me, but with different URLs which redirect you to this very same FAKE Facebook page. I’m listing some of the URLs here, and I’ll tell you, the actual list goes far beyond this. Some of the FAKE URLs were http://elvapovep.blogspot.com, http://traceygisyrif.blogspot.com, http://yeseniamaten.blogspot.com, http://isabelfaremad.blogspot.com, http://merletozywy.blogspot.com http://glendarodyz.blogspot.com, http://gabriellenugyhy.blogspot.com, http://darlenebepip.blogspot.com. What this hacker does is he first tries to get your username and password by providing you a FAKE Facebook login page (which is http://faceilbook.com/) and if you provide your login details there, he’ll try to hack all the friends in your friends list by sending them Wall posts, as you sending them. Therefore be vigilant whenever you type your username and password when you login to Facebook or any other account you have (E-mail, Hi5, MySpace etc). Spend few seconds to make sure that the URL appearing on the address bar is not a phishing Web site, which is looking to steal your username and password. Say NO to PHISHING.