If you are active on Facebook, in all probability you must have noticed a sudden surge in these odd video posts from some friend of yours on your or your friends’ timelines today. Beware, these posts are spam links and are being automatically generated from affected users’ profiles. Tapping on the link will affect your profile and may in turn auto generate similar videos and post them on other people’s profile on your behalf. To help you identify these links easily, the virus videos that are being circulated today, carry a link of “RIGVTL1F.LATESTNEWSTODAYS. COM.” And the reason why people are easily being tricked to click on them is because, these look personalized, your profile picture and your name written on the post. Some people have also received these links as ‘My first video’. The one that was posted on my wall read “Nandini’s video” with my profile picture next to it, and it was posted by a friend on my timeline. So, I could have been easily tricked.
It is probably a virus that hacks into your friends’ profile and easily spreads on the social network platform. If you have been affected by the spam, you must delete the posts from your wall immediately. Even if you understand that the link is infected with virus, but if you let it sit on your wall, someone else who visits your profile might click on it, in turn being hit by the virus.
This isn’t the first time such a virus has hit Facebook users. In fact, such spams have been going on for a few years now. Though many users on Facebook have begun to understand that these auto-generated links could be infected with virus, still a lot of people become victims of such malicious posts.
How to get rid of the spam
If knowingly or unknowingly you have clicked on the link, there’s a quick and easy way to get rid of the spam from your profile. To begin with, you should put up a status or message your friends to alert them that those posts are auto-generated and they must not click on them. And if the post has multiple people tagged, request your friends that are tagged in the post to untag themselves, by going to the post or the Activity log. That would be the best way to stop the virus from spreading. Also, like mentioned earlier, you must delete the post immediately. You can go to your Activity Log to check which friends have been affected by your spam. You can manually delete those posts as well.
If your profile starts auto-posting posts that are credited to you which you did not make, they are likely from a rogue app on your Facebook account, malicious script or malware on your computer. These virus can be caused by a malicious app on Facebook, a bad script or a malware on your computer. Therefore, to remove the problem from the root cause, run all three safety measures. Firstly, check the apps on your account that you do not recognize or that are suspicious, and remove them. To remove an app, go to Facebook Settings>Apps and hover over the apps that you find suspicious, and click on the cross icon.
Secondly, clear your browser website history, cache (temporary internet files), and cookies to remove malicious scripts. And if you use more than one browser to access Facebook, make sure to clean them all.
Lastly, if you use Facebook using desktop, there could be malware on your system that may be spreading the virus. To get rid of that, run a full scan with your anti-virus program. Additionally, many anti-virus programs overlook browser add-ons, so make sure to check your browser add-ons and disable any that are suspicious.
