First ‘Faroese’ phishing attack

The Faroese police have received reports of a phishing attack with Faroese text in which people are asked to click a link and then log into their Facebook account.

Police are urging everyone not to click this link or any other link that asks people to log into their Facebook account.

This is the first real phishing attack with Faroese text, says Trygvi Askham, of the technical investigations unit.

Politi, Phising-álop

“People are asked to click a link in order to aid investigations into a traffic accident. When they click the link, they are asked to log into their Facebook account. This gives the hackers access to the person’s Facebook login data,” he explains

“If you have clicked this link, change your Facebook password immediately. Some have managed to do this by using the ‘forgot password’ function. If this does not work, contact Facebook support for help to recover your account.”

Police have been expecting to see phishing attacks using the Faroese language since the Microsoft Translator app began supporting the Faroese language earlier this year.

Be vigilant

There are two major ways to determine whether requests such as this one are real or fake:

“Due to a glitch in the Microsoft Translator app, the translated texts often feature lots of forward slashes as we see in this case,” says Askham.

“Another, perhaps even more obvious, red flag is that the Faroese police only issues appeals through its official social media accounts.”

Wikipedia defines phishing as “a type of social engineering where an attacker sends a fraudulent (e.g., spoofed, fake, or otherwise deceptive) message designed to trick a person into revealing sensitive information to the attacker[1] or to deploy malicious software on the victim's infrastructure like ransomware.”

Read the Faroese version of this article here.

More Faroese News in English.