The H5N1
Registered Member
- Dec 4, 2011
- 62
- 1
Since I can't post URLS yet I am going to copy and paste an article from the Wall Street Journal about Twitter and Facebook's attempts to stop spammers. Is this the end of products like TweetAttacks and others?
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Published : Wednesday, 04 Jan 2012, 4:50 AM EST THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
PALO ALTO, Calif. - Facebook and Twitter are building up their forces to fight an emerging enemy: "social" spam.
One of their foot soldiers is Tao Stein, a Facebook engineer. At 4:00am local time one May morning, Stein was jolted out of bed by a spam alert on his cell phone. Facebook was being inundated with messages that read, "hey check out this link FREE IPAD."
But there was no free iPad -- just malware that caused Facebook users who clicked on the link to unintentionally rebroadcast the annoying message to friends.
Spam, one of the internet's oldest annoyances, is gearing up for a second act. Unlike traditional email spam, which usually comes from strangers, this new form -- dubbed "social" spam -- often appears to be from a friend. Criminals find social networks alluring because they can spread messages though a chain of trusted sources.
Such spam puts the usefulness of social networking at risk. Facebook says less than four percent of the content shared on its site is spam, and Twitter says just 1.5 percent of all tweets were "spammy" in 2010. But Facebook adds that the volume is growing faster than its user base. On any given day, spam hits less than 0.5 percent of Facebook users, or some four million people.
In 2008, Facebook had just four engineers like Stein working on site integrity. Today, he works with a team of 30, plus a separate security team of 46 and another 300 focused on user issues. In all, some 1,000 of Facebook's 3,000 employees -- including engineers, lawyers, user-operations managers and risk analysts -- play a role in fighting spam in some capacity, the company said.
Meanwhile, Twitter said that by the end of the year, it will have five "spam science" programmers -- up from two such employees now -- and nine account-abuse specialists on its staff of about 750.
Social spam is growing as attacks launched via traditional email come-ons appear to be declining. In November, 70.5 percent of all email was spam, down from a recent high of 92.2 percent in August 2010, according to security-software maker Symantec. Improved filters and law enforcement have made email attacks increasingly difficult.
"Spammers have decided to move where the people are and where the defenses are weak: Facebook and Twitter," according to Chester Wisniewski, an analyst at security firm Sophos.
__________-
Published : Wednesday, 04 Jan 2012, 4:50 AM EST THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
PALO ALTO, Calif. - Facebook and Twitter are building up their forces to fight an emerging enemy: "social" spam.
One of their foot soldiers is Tao Stein, a Facebook engineer. At 4:00am local time one May morning, Stein was jolted out of bed by a spam alert on his cell phone. Facebook was being inundated with messages that read, "hey check out this link FREE IPAD."
But there was no free iPad -- just malware that caused Facebook users who clicked on the link to unintentionally rebroadcast the annoying message to friends.
Spam, one of the internet's oldest annoyances, is gearing up for a second act. Unlike traditional email spam, which usually comes from strangers, this new form -- dubbed "social" spam -- often appears to be from a friend. Criminals find social networks alluring because they can spread messages though a chain of trusted sources.
Such spam puts the usefulness of social networking at risk. Facebook says less than four percent of the content shared on its site is spam, and Twitter says just 1.5 percent of all tweets were "spammy" in 2010. But Facebook adds that the volume is growing faster than its user base. On any given day, spam hits less than 0.5 percent of Facebook users, or some four million people.
In 2008, Facebook had just four engineers like Stein working on site integrity. Today, he works with a team of 30, plus a separate security team of 46 and another 300 focused on user issues. In all, some 1,000 of Facebook's 3,000 employees -- including engineers, lawyers, user-operations managers and risk analysts -- play a role in fighting spam in some capacity, the company said.
Meanwhile, Twitter said that by the end of the year, it will have five "spam science" programmers -- up from two such employees now -- and nine account-abuse specialists on its staff of about 750.
Social spam is growing as attacks launched via traditional email come-ons appear to be declining. In November, 70.5 percent of all email was spam, down from a recent high of 92.2 percent in August 2010, according to security-software maker Symantec. Improved filters and law enforcement have made email attacks increasingly difficult.
"Spammers have decided to move where the people are and where the defenses are weak: Facebook and Twitter," according to Chester Wisniewski, an analyst at security firm Sophos.
