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Facebook Spammed with Porn and Violent Images

Just recently, when we opened our respective Facebook accounts, there were several porn images as well as disturbing pictures of animal cruelty and some violent accidents scattered along the individual home pages. You can even see some pictures of Justine Bieber having sex or a bloody decapitated accident victim.

It is indeed the latest Facebook hack. The spammers were successfully planted some pornographic and violent images in its network. There were a lot of uncomfortable images of accidents and some were about the cruelty to animals.


According to Mashable, users tend to see the images posted on a friend's account, visible to everyone but the friend in question.

Mashable (Mashable Inc.), founded by Pete Cashmore, is an American news website and Internet news blog. The website's primary focus is social media news, but also covers news and developments in mobile, entertainment, online video, business, web development, technology, memes and gadgets. Mashable was launched by Pete Cashmore in July 2005 from his home in Aberdeen, Scotland.

Mashable ranks as one of the world's largest websites with a reported astonishing 50+ million monthly pageviews and an under 250 Alexa ranking. One of the 25 best blogs in 2009 as Time Magazine noted Mashable, and has been described as "one stop shop" for social media. It has over two million Twitter followers and over 425,000 fans on Facebook as of February 2011.

Mashable announced that it had acquired Blippr on March 9, 2009, a micro-reviews service based on the concept that users can review games, books, movies, music, and web applications in 160 characters or less.

However, Facebook have identified the hacker as far as their investigation is concerned. 

Though it was originally suspected by several news agencies, the attacker is not a member of the hacktivist organization Anonymous.

Facebook traced the attack to exploited browser vulnerability, in a statement posted on tech site "Boy Genius Reports".

According to BGR, Facebook claims that, "Our efforts have drastically limited the damage caused by this attack, and we are now in the process of investigating to identify those responsible. During this spam attack users were tricked into pasting and executing malicious JavaScript in their browser URL bar causing them to unknowingly share this offensive content".

“We do not know yet who was behind the attack and a motive was not clear”, Facebook spokesperson Andrew Noyes emailed Reuters a statement.

Facebook also claims that their engineers have been working diligently on this "self-XSS vulnerability" in the browser.

It also said it has built enforcement mechanisms to quickly shut down the malicious pages and accounts that attempt to exploit it.

Facebook also claims that, "We have also been putting those affected through educational checkpoints so they know how to protect themselves. We’ve put in place backend measures to reduce the rate of these attacks and will continue to iterate on our defenses to find new ways to protect people".

Expressing outrage over the images that computer security firm Sophos said ranged from modified celebrity photos to pictures of extreme violence and animal abuse, users tend to shout it out via Twitter according to PC World.

PC World also quoted Romanian security vendor BitDefender as saying the "Anonymous" hacker collective had created a classic Facebook worm codenamed "Fawkes Virus" last July, and pledged to use it to celebrate Guy Fawkes Day, Nov. 5.

Senior threat researcher at Trend Micro Inc. Paul Ferguson said Facebook and other "Web 2.0" sites are easy targets for such attacks since they pull in a lot of content from outside sources.

"It seems every other day there is some new Facebook 'threat,' but this is just the new reality of Web 2.0 and social networking," according to Ferguson, "It is 'low-hanging fruit' for criminals."

Facebook claims that this scenario will be ended and resolved very soon.

However, for security reasons, go to your facebook "Account Settings", then go to "Security" located on the upper left corner of you Facebook account then "enable" the Secure Browsing for added security.

You could also inform some of your friends if their accounts have been posting some disturbing images.

Cheerio!
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Comments

  1. BloggerJanuary 1, 2017 at 1:08 AM

    Have used AVG protection for a number of years now, I'd recommend this product to all of you.

    ReplyDelete

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