Annoying Tagging Warm-up for Gangnam Style Scam Ball

Just as all other pop-culture ephemerids, the Gangnam craze has caught us in its maze. College fresher statement video? Do it Gangnam style! Internet meme that`s bound to propel you to online social heaven? Gangnam, again. Tons of parodies for your own 15 minutes of fame? Gan-gnam, gan-gnam, gan-gnam.

It`s THE thing to have, do, imitate, show or look at. So, what happens now in the Scammersmith family`s backyard? Mom, Dad and the little ones gather around the garden table for a little DIY project: paying their respects to the newly-risen Gangnam god. What better way to do it than through a sublime scammy Facebook app?

The funny thing about DIYs is that you don`t get things right from the start. It takes a little practice to perfect your skills, but where there`s a will there`s always a way.

A quick look at the repertoire of Gangnam-inspired social goodies provides us with a very interesting picture: on the Pages side, you have the potential audience of the phenomenon (i.e. hundreds of thousands), while on the Apps side you get the attempts made so far to fish in the very crowded Gangnam seas.

The most ambitious of projects, the app with the apparent 100,000 users, gets you nowhere.

It`s a dead-end you literally can`t like as there is no button for you to do so.

Next, a very compelling contender whose visual ID is one of the top Gangnam icons. This time, your click will actually take you somewhere.

Like the page to see how you and your friends should get your Gangnam moves on. So you just click and wait. Then wait some more, as the thing that you`ve just installed does not seem to have done anything. How about clicking some more? Maybe you get lucky this time.

If, at some point you get tired of the senseless clicking and decide to go back to your Timeline, hold on tight to your seat. You`re in for a big surprise.

Every time you clicked, the app posted a Gangnam photo in an album and tagged one of best friends in it. Isn`t that nice?

While this does not qualify as straightforward malicious behavior, it might clash with Facebook`s policy of refraining from automatically tagging friends in photos that do not actually represent them. Now you can also annoy your friends and they can hate you for it – Gangnam style!

Finally, Gangnam-ness enters urban dictionaries as one of the online socialites` most praised qualities. No two Gangnamites are the same, so why not play a little “mine is bigger than yours” game?

Harmless statistics show-downs are classics of the Facebook world, I`ll give you that. However, have we not learnt from the best not to trust appearances at all?

Take a look at what permissions the honorable Gangnamometer requires:

Why would it need your e-mail address, birthday and likes? A little bit of nicely targeted spam, anyone?

Keep the Gangnam spirit going, but don`t go liking any page you land on and do take the time to read permission descriptions before hitting Allow them. A true Gangnam would, so why don`t you?

This article is based on the technical information provided courtesy of Steliana Goga, Bitdefender Software Developer and Andrei Serbanoiu, BitDefender Software Analyst.

All product and company names mentioned herein are for identification purposes only and are the property of, and may be trademarks of, their respective owners.