Do you know Jayden K. Smith?
No?
Then why would you accept a Facebook friend request from him?
If you’re like most people, you wouldn’t, and your friends are probably just like you, so warning them against the “hacker” Smith may be more of an annoyance than anything else.
Still, people’s Facebook Messenger app has been dinging with warnings against accepting friend requests from Smith:
“Please tell all the contacts in your messenger list not to accept Jayden K. Smith friendship request. He is a hacker and has the system connected to your Facebook account. If one of your contacts accepts it, you will also be hacked, so make sure that all your friends know it,” the message says.
“It’s gone viral in the purest sense of the word,” said Brian Kelly, chief information security officer at Quinnipiac University.
The people that are most vulnerable to an actual hacker are teenagers who will accept any friend request whether they know the person or not, Kelly said. “If you have over a thousand friends in a certain age group, you’re really, really cool.”
Most people won’t simply accept any potential friend who comes along, but “the inherent message is to be careful, to be cautious when accepting any friend request,” Kelly said.
Also, make sure your personal information, including your friend list, is private.
Aside from being mildly annoying, the message you’re receiving from your friends is harmless. “There’s nothing in this hoax message that’s going around” that will harm your computer, Kelly said. It’s just that “everybody’s sending it to everybody they know.”
Even accepting a request from “Smith” won’t give him access to anything beyond your Facebook account, but then you might start getting messages with links that lead to malware, which can infect your computer, Kelly said.
“That familiarity helps the bad guy get you to click on the link,” he said.
The other problem is that someone could create a fake account in your name, copying your profile photo, and then sending requests to your list of friends. “If I can see a list of friends I can make a fake ‘you’ account and then I can send a friend request to all of your friends,” Kelly said. That’s why it’s important to be careful not to accept a friend request from someone you know if you know you’re already Facebook friends.
“If you already have a friend named Brian Kelly and you get another friend request, that’s what we call in the industry ‘account cloning,’” Kelly said.
“At the end of the day, they want to gain your trust, the old confidence game. … They’re going to trick you out of your credit card … your identity. It’s all about money.”
As for the most recent flurry of messages, “We don’t know from a security standpoint whether Jayden K. Smith is a real person,” Kelly said.
So what’s the best response to an urgent warning from a Facebook friend? “You should just delete it, respond to the sender, say ‘Thanks for letting me know.’”
Call Ed Stannard at 203-680-9382.
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