back to article Link spammers go on social networking rampage

Spammers have found a fertile new marketplace on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. The 'wall' feature on Facebook is being abused by spammers to post deceptive messages, linking to spam sites such as online "pharmacy" shops. The tactic is similar to the long-standing link-spamming approach which involves …

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  1. James Radley
    Happy

    Filtering

    I did notice on FB this week, that they are starting to filter out some of the Wall using text matching, to try and reduce the spam.

    To be honest, the majority of spam that I got in FB came from the fwits who belived that hitting "Forward(fast)" was actually a way to find out who fancied you. Everyone knows you have to hit ALT-F4 to find that information.

    It's like infantile IRC tricks all over again. But fortunately, it's now been filtered out which should stop most spam from spreading.

  2. Cameron Colley

    How can you tell?

    How can you tell if MySpace pages contain spam links? All the MySpaces I've seen look to be comprised of nothing but spam. Sorry, badly-coded spam.

  3. Jamie

    ALT+F4

    And here I thought that you had to press CTRL+F4

  4. Whoopsie

    Net security firm Websense?

    Since when has Websense been a 'net security firm'?

    "Clueless purveyors of sub-par content filtering for the lazy" more like.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    the Wall

    I guess Facebook's security people thought they didn't need no education...

  6. Jimbo Gunn
    Alien

    Let me see - how would I go about mas-hijacking of FaceSpace acounts?

    Hmmm, well I'd need to steal a load of sign-on cookies, so I could sit in a few internet cafes snooping and hope I can catch a few...

    Or even better, could I find some way to plant malware actually inside an ISP so I can harvest cookies of millions of FaceSpace accounts, in order to accountjack? That would be tough, because the routers used by ISPs are quite hardy boxes...

    ... If only someone would install a piece of hardware inside the ISP that I could get a chance of pwning. But that would never happen, right.

  7. James Thomas

    Phishing for FB accounts must be super-easy...

    Given that when I had a FaceBook account I recieved an almost spam-like quantity of official and identical emails, all with a link to log in, I imagine it's child's play to fake them.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    ISP side traffic sniffing..

    As someone who's worked for telco's & ISPs before, I can guarantee you that snooping happens quite often... and most of the time it's just staff, and they (most likely) won't do anything you'd care about with the information they glean. Quite often it's just part of network performance testing or general diagnostics and sometimes curiosity.. but very rarely snooping on specific individuals (we *know* you look at porn, download copyrighted files content, send compromising emails, we don't need to prove it to ourselves)

    I remember getting access through password sniffing to a few pron sites in my day (after ensuring that the site was fixed-fee, so as not to charge the customer more) - no biggie. In a reasonably well publicised screwup in Oz, a large mobile firm made undelivered MMSs accessible through a simple URL hack (luckily no personal details available along with it). I've decided that half the male population of Australia sends pictures of their dicks around, and that there aren't enough attractive women sending naked photos (but still a substantial number ..... and news for you, girls, guys DO forward your photos to their friends.. oh, the duplicates that I saw!) .. other interesting hobbies inside the workplace included searches on the SMS database for various words.. people are funny, when they think nobody's watching. :-) Statistically speaking, nobody is, of course. :-)

  9. Andy

    I'm a spammer.... bitch!

    Maybe Mark Zuckerberg could *finally* find a way to make money from Facebook. Peddling porn and viagra isn't a long way to stretch from Beacon.

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