Facebook Exploit Filling Feeds With Gore and Porn

There’s a new Facebook exploit out there that showed up a few days ago, but is only just now reaching critical mass. What does it do? Not much, just post gore and pornography to the infected user’s feed, causing them to unwittingly share it with all their friends, their acquaintances, a number of people they’ve probably never met, and sometimes even Grandma. The exploit has been snowballing over the past few days, affecting more and more users directly by forcing them to post the material, and even more indirectly, those who just have the pleasure of stumbling across them.

The exploit is your standard linkspam virus and is baited with your typical “click here to find out about [pop icon]! Blah blah blah!” Apparently, that hasn’t become quite enough of a warning flag for some users who may actually be interested in [pop icon], and so the exploit is doing fairly well for itself. Once the link is clicked, the user’s timeline is filled up with all kinds of lovely pictures of porn and gore, explicit sex and explicit violence. Good times.

Some people are pointing fingers at Anonymous, who supposedly claimed to be planning to take out the social networking giant on Guy Fawkes day. This is almost certainly as misguided as it was last time. While the variety of grotesque images is rather reminiscent of /b/, from which Anonymous spawned, the attack is not Anonymous’ style at all. First of all, it’s not a DDoS attack or an information leak, and second of all, if Anonymous was being mischievous, you can bet that they would be talking about it, loudly.

The more likely explanation is that someone, or some group of people — perhaps people who’ve affiliated with Anonymous at other times — are causing a little bit of chaos to wreak havoc on, and maybe draw some attention to, the insecurity of Facebook from an account sercurity angle as well as a “We are becoming a culture of over-sharing — let me show the logical extreme” angle. I haven’t had the luck (or misfortune) of seeing any of the images myself, but I try to cull my friends list frequently and the exploit seems to be hitting mostly those who play fast and loose with Facebook.

In any event, Facebook is obviously looking into the cause of the images and trying to find a way to make them stop. In the mean time, don’t click any unsolicited links about any pop icon, especially Kim Kardashian, unless you want to spam your friends and loved ones with gore and porn. Then again, if you do want to do that, you probably don’t have that many friends or loved ones to spam.

(via ZDNet)

Relevant to your interests

• I still maintain that Anonymous at large never actually threatened Facebook
• Zuck’s own page got hacked a while back
• A recent survey showed that youngin’s aren’t too bothered by hacking. Maybe that’ll change now

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Eric Limer