Fake Midjourney AI Facebook page with 1.2 million followers gets caught for pushing malware

A new report from Bitdefender, a cybersecurity company, has shed light on fake Facebook pages that are pushing malware and infostealers through ads. One good example from the report is a Midjourney AI page, which boasted 1.2 million followers and was luring people to download malicious files.

The report pointed to other pages attempting the same thing with different generative AI tools, including ChatGPT, DALL-E, and Sora. What’s more interesting is that these fraudsters aren’t just limiting the attacks on Facebook pages. They are also creating a fake website that imitates the real thing, but, as you may have expected, these sites are attempting to make the visitors download malware. These websites are linked in the malicious ads the pages are running.

As the report notes, most of the targeted people are men aged between 25 and 55. The majority of the Facebook users who fell for the fake Midjourney AI and other generative AI tools are from Europe. Instead of downloading any legitimate tool, most got Rilide v4, an infostealer impersonating a Google Translate extension for web browsers. Other malware that these pages pushed include Vidar, Nova, and IceRAT.

Getting back to the fake Midjourney AI page with 1.2 million followers, it had an ad reach of more than 500 thousand Facebook users before it got taken down on March 8. It’s unclear whether Meta shut down the page for multiple reports made by the victims or by Midjourney developers.

The cybersecurity company notes that most of these pages didn’t start off as what they are now. Instead, hackers found vulnerable pages with a decent number of followers, took them over, and started their scamming campaign.

Now, while the fake Midjourney AI page got taken down, there are tons of active Facebook pages doing the same thing. What you need to note about these is that generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Sora, and DALL-E, don’t have a downloadable version for PC. They are only accessible online, and you won’t likely get random free access to their premium subscriptions from Facebook.

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