Facebook Responds to Wall Post Spam With New Security Feature
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.
September 12th, 2008 at 11:03 am
[...] can get a better idea for which links are actually spam and which aren’t, as Mike Knoop points out over at Inside Facebook (where I got the above screenshot). This way, Facebook could figure out [...]
September 12th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
[...] itself can get a better idea for which links are actually spam and which aren’t, as Mike Knoop points out over at Inside Facebook (where I got the above screenshot). This way, Facebook could figure out [...]
September 16th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
[...] deleting all of your social accounts, and retreating into the mountains. Not only is Facebook fighting back against would-be evil doers, but there are simple actions you can take to protect yourself while [...]
December 20th, 2008 at 8:54 pm
dan magdowski was here
December 28th, 2009 at 12:01 am
[...] network sites have not (yet) demonstrated the high degree of proactive surveillance and enforcement characteristic of other [...]
January 3rd, 2010 at 9:19 am
[...] network sites have not (yet) demonstrated the high degree of proactive surveillance and enforcement characteristic of other [...]