Inside Facebook

In further response to recent security issues Facebook has been facing from worms and chain letters, Facebook has released a new security feature to further deter spam wall posts from propagating within the site.

In addition to showing warnings when posting a potentially harmful URL, Facebook has introduced a redirect URL that is automatically prepended into the URL in wall post as part the questionable URL. Currently, this filtering is only being applied to URLs previously marked as spam. Clicking the posted URL will show the following warning:

A large majority of spam wall posts are being made by hijacked Facebook accounts, whose passwords are being stolen by Facebook phishing websites often linked to in these spam messages. It is clear that Facebook is attempting to curb the “viral” factor that this mechanism once had within their network.

Facebook could potentially be tracking what percentage of users click Continue vs. Cancel on the warning page. This could effectively funtion very similarly to the current spam reporting mechanism that exists within the notification and request framework. In this scenario, as more users click Continue instead of Cancel, the URL may be eventually taken off of Facebook’s wall spam URL blacklist.