Facebook has a Deluge of Malicious Profiles

According to Cloudmark's European Head of Technology Services - Neil Cook, a research completed by the company reveals that about 20-40% of all new profiles on Facebook, the popular site for social networking, could be fake and dangerous as they are created to push malicious content, as reported by Vnunet on October 7, 2008.

Cook further explicated that once Facebook has fake profiles posted on it, virus and malware authors encourage the users to follow links pointing to malicious Websites by incorporating them on other members' blog or wall postings.

Security specialists at Cloudmark also said that malware writers use another tactic - requests from friends or personal e-mails - to trick users into going to their profile Web pages. The profile Web page then diverts users onto a malicious site.

Further, as per the study by Cloudmark, nearly 64 large-scale spam attacks were reported against sites for social networking during 2007, and 37% users of such sites have observed a rise in unwanted e-mails over the last six months starting from March 2008. Many spam attacks with the same messages are reportedly bombarded on hundreds of unsuspected users.

Security specialists also reveal that social networking sites like Facebook have some inherent properties that ideally allow cyber criminals to exploit them. These characteristics provide criminals opportunities to manipulate massive crowd of online users, and encourage them to carry out anti-social acts secretly that affect the remaining Internet users.

Cook added that social networking sites offer a great potential for collaboration so they are great places for virus writers and spammers to attack. As soon as these sites are launched, the attacks start, he said.

Also, security specialists disclose that over the past few months, Facebook users have been increasingly targeted in phishing and other malware attacks as the share of these sites in the market has been increasing.

Besides, malware attacks on Facebook users are not new. In late September 2008, security investigators had found one such attack in which a spam campaign based on social engineering tactics enticed victims and spread malware by impersonating the Facebook's official domain 'facebookmail.com.'

Related article: Facebook Users Should be Careful of a Computer Virus

» SPAMfighter News - 13-10-2008

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