My brother received a message from one of his juniors in college, that said something like, ‘Bro, don’t click on the message that was received from me. It is some sorta scam.’ As soon as I got up today, ‘You know, apparently, this guy got this HTML file as a message. He clicked on that and that posted some video on his wall that he’s not able to remove now. Also, this has sent messages to all his friends about this as well,’ my brother said.

This scam might be old news to some, but it got me curious. What could the HTML possibly contain that could do this kinda stuff? But one thing that I did not buy is how the guy could not delete the post. But that’s fine. The HTML file itself was pretty exciting to me. So I asked my brother if he’d received anything from the said friend of his. Lucky me, he had. I had him send over the HTML to me. I opened up the file with Brackets, and here’s what the HTML looked like:

Perfect. Now I wanted to know what the HTML did. I just opened up the first URL in it (in a Private Window, of course). It downloaded another HTML, which was:

OK. Now what was that gibberish, right? Thankfully, our Internet community is very kind, and generous, and… well, awesome. So there was a decode tool available online, which decoded the gibberish to:

Nothing special, actually. Now what did this do? Apparently, this is some content hosted on Amazon Web Services (which the creator of the HTML didn’t want the search engines to index—hence the gibberish-like encoding), by one of these geeks, who seems to like social engineering. I just hit the URL, https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/video47543/red.html?erwhaererahera. It was some YouTube-lookalike page, with a video preview-like thing, with a title, ‘18+’ or something. Obviously, there was nothing playable there (aww…). ;)

But why would someone do this? I’m not really sure. Perhaps it was one of those I-too-can-do-it kinda thing that most nerds like to do. Perhaps it was for some study that people wanted to do to see how naïve most Facebook users are, and to make people realise their folly. Or perhaps, it was just some fun thing that this geek did, having nothing to do one evening. Or something more evil—who knows? LOL

I’m not going to go into the details as to how he implemented this all, like what this document.location.replace() is, or how the encoding was done, etc. Just know that there are a lot of things happening out there, and you need to be aware of this stuff.

This is not to say that anyone is fool-proof. Nobody is. Social Engineering is a vast thing, and there are hundreds (or thousands) of ways one can become a victim of these—sometimes, even social engineers themselves get caught off-guard. Just… keep and eye out.

Cheers! :)