Staff Reporters
Nov 16, 2011

Facebook investigating spam attack

GLOBAL - Facebook is investigating and working to remove offensive content after the social networking site was hit by what appears to have been a coordinated spamming attack featuring pornographic and violent images.

Facebook investigating spam attack

The site has confirmed that a significant number of Facebook users found the images as part of their news feeds. It says these users were tricked in to pasting and executing "malicious" javascript in to their browsers' URL bars. This caused them to unknowingly share the offensive content with their networks, and creating a larger web of affected users.

Facebook says its engineers have been working around the clocks to plug the vulnerability.

"We've built enforcement mechanisms to quickly shut down the malicious pages and accounts that attempt to exploit it," Facebook spokesman Frederic Wolens has been advising blogs and technology websites. "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 our defences to find new ways to protect people."

The attacks took place over Monday and Tuesday of this week, with Wolens stating that most of the offensive images had been removed by yesterday afternoon in the US.

 

Source:
Campaign Asia
Tags

Related Articles

Just Published

2 hours ago

Agency Report Card 2024: Dentsu Media

Dentsu Media navigated a turbulent 2024, marked by financial pressures, leadership instability, and structural reorganisation, even as it pushed forward with AI investments and selective market successes.

2 hours ago

Agency Report Cards 2024: We grade 25 APAC networks

The grades are in for Campaign Asia's 22nd annual evaluation of APAC agency networks. Subscribe to read our detailed analyses.

4 hours ago

Google enhances ads portfolio with new AI-powered ...

The tech giant unveiled a series of updates to Google Ads, analytics and search, including launching agentic AI tools.