Source: “Detecting and Characterizing Social Spam Campaigns”
Hongyu Gao et al. ACM Internet Measurement Conference, November
1-3, 2010, Melbourne, Australia Results: In the first large-
scale study of spam activity on Facebook, researchers at
Northwestern University and the University of California, Santa
Barbara, showed that most of these messages originate from
compromised accounts rather than from phony profiles. Spammers
use those accounts to send messages to a victim’s friends.
Typically, the messages contain links to pharmacy sites or pages
that attempt to steal more account details. Why it matters: With
more than half a billion users, Facebook is a tempting target
for spammers but one that is much more difficult to exploit than
e-mail. Understanding how spammers are using Facebook is
important to developing defenses against them as the network
continues to grow and as attack strategies evolve. Academics say
that publicly reporting spam also encourages Facebook to be more
forthcoming about its efforts to