(WSPA) – Facebook has sued the makers of a number of online quizzes, saying these tests acted as a ploy to hack tens of thousands of accounts.
These quizzes asked broad questions like ‘Do you have royal blood?’, ‘What is the color of your aura?’ or ‘What animal are you?’.
Facebook claimed in a lawsuit filed recently that the quizzes were created by two Ukrainian developers and were gaining access to private user data without user knowledge.
“In the meantime, this malicious malware browser extension is in the background scraping data and giving the information that the hackers want to be able to sell on the black market,” said Matthew Tisdal, a senior network engineer for Pivotal IT in Spartanburg.
In the lawsuit, Facebook claimed the hackers accessed things like names, ages, photos, and their private list of Facebook friends.
Facebook also accused the alleged hackers of targeting users with unauthorized advertisements, and claimed they even posed as users online.
Experts recommended to us that it’s wise to Google any game, article or quiz separately before clicking a link in your news feed.
Social media users said they were surprised to learn about the allegations.
“What color are your eyes? What could that say about you? Or I bet we can tell where you grew up based on the snacks you ate,” said Noah Queen. “Some stuff you would type in, and it would be completely off the wall, like saying you grew up in Montana but you grew up in Florida.”
If you’re concerned you may have used Facebook to log into a malicious app, you can review that in your settings options under “Apps and Websites”.
There you can see the apps you’ve given permission to access your account.