The Diablo Facebook page has been running their “new art for every 25k likes” promotion since early February, and during that time the page has seen about 25,000 new likes per week. Refer to our Facebook category news tag for an easy list. The milestones have ticked on February 9, February 15, February 22, March 3, March 11, and March 17. Every 6-7 days, like clockwork.

The sixth update was at 675k on Thursday, which meant 700k should have rolled around this Wednesday or Thursday. Instead, as Frisky points out, the pace of likes has increased sevenfold, and as of Sunday evening there were 705,560 likes, meaning more than 30k have been added in 3 days. What’s happened here? Did an avalanche of new fans suddenly discover Diablo on Facebook? Perhaps, but most likely we’re looking at a classic case of “likejacking.” Whazzat?

Security researchers are warning of the newest Facebook threat, something they’re calling “likejacking,” a Facebook-enabled clickjacking attack that tricks users into clicking links that mark the clicked site as one of your Facebook “likes.” These likes then show up on your profile and, of course, in your Facebook News Feed where your friends can see the link and click it, allowing the vicious, viral cycle to continue.

Avoiding this sort of likejacking is quite easy, and removing the “virus” from your FB account is simple… which means that the vast majority of people will never do so. Nevertheless, here’s the how to:

If you have been hit in the latest clickjacking attack on Facebook, go into your Facebook account and view the recent activity on your news feed. Delete entries related to any of the above messages. As an added step, take a closer look at your profile. Go to the info tab and remove any of the unwanted pages from your “Likes and interests” section.

We don’t yet know what viral scam is being used to trick people into clicking something that gives them false likes of Diablo III. The very concept puzzles me; what could people find more enticing to click on than Diablo III itself? *cough*

The real question, of course, is what does Blizzard do about this, if it continues at this rate? Do they try to find and shut down the (apparent) likejacking that’s benefiting them with free publicity? Do they honor their 25k promise and start throwing up new images every other day? Personally, I hope they just make it a weekly image, or change it to 75k likes or something, since I prefer the (mostly) new images weekly. I’d rather have actual new game content/info, but pics are better than nothing. If this likejacking causes them to blow through the 12 remaining updates in a fortnight we’ll have a lot of pretty pictures this week, but a damn boring April and May ahead of us…