The Department of Communications and Technology (DICT) has warned the public against signing up with the ‘revived’ Friendster as the website may possibly be used for phishing.
This after a social media page, Stunner, posted on Saturday about the revival of the once massively popular social networking platform and supposedly accepting new sign ups.
“Thousands of people have already signed up for the “new” Friendster. However, CERT-PH has assessed that the said website is possibly used for phishing,” said DICT in a statement on Facebook.
While the ‘new’ Friendster appears to be a legitimate website upon CERT-PH’s initial investigation, its current IP address hosting the website (23.106.120.84) supposedly ‘had previous reports about phishing, brute force and DDoS attacks, hacking, and host exploitations’.
The link provided uses .click, which is a non-popular top level domain, while the original Friendster uses .com domain.
It also does not include an ‘About Us’ page and uses WordPress which is not used for social networking platforms as it is more of content management system.
CERT-PH further recommends the following actions to be taken: Do not click suspicious links to avoid future potential threats; Do not register to this website because your data may be compromised; and in addition, providing and capacitating employees with cybersecurity knowledge and information to minimize threats.
Before Facebook’s rise to global popularity, Friendster was the top social networking services way back in 2004.
With rival platforms such as Facebook, MySpace and Hi5 gradually eating up on its subscribers, Friendster eventually shut down its social networking services in 2015 mainly due to the lack of the company’s technology which led to a bad user experience.
In 2011, Friendster tried to shift from a social networking platform to a gaming and entertainment platform but this too did not help in regaining its old glory and eventually closed down as a company in 2018.