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Facebook spam prevention scam spreading like wildfire

Social media worm d'jour

The growing prevalence of junk messages on Facebook is been used to bait a new scam doing the rounds on the social network.

Prospective marks in receipt of the fraudulent messages are invited to "verify" their account in order to "prevent spam". Recipients who respond to the message by clicking on a link end up sharing it on their wall as well as spreading highly obfuscated JavaScript.

"With all the unexpected Sharing going on, this message has spread like wild-fire," warns net security firm Sophos. "Instead of preventing spam, this particular campaign has been generating it at astonishing rates."

A full write-up of the scam, including images of the offending messaging, can be found in a blog post by Sophos here.

Rogue apps that generate spam are becoming an increasing nuisance on multiple social networks. The Facebook worm comes days after the appearance of a rogue app on Twitter that falsely promised to tell recipients how much time they had spent on the network. Twitter responded promptly and pulled the plug on TimeChecker2.6 by revoking its auth_token key. A detailed write-up on the attack can be found here. ®

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