Internet’s oldest pest, spam, is now moving away from email to social networks. With the ever growing popularity of social networks, spammers are now targeting the two most popular social networking sites – Facebook and Twitter – like never before.
In November 2011, 70 percent of all email was spam, down from 92 percent in August 2010. While the percentage of spam on social networks is still relative low compared to email, with Facebook saying that less than 4 percent of the content shared on their site is spam and affects 0.5 percent (4 million) of its users on any given day. Whereas, Twitter says just 1.5 percent of all tweets were spam in 2010.
But, don’t think the social network sites are just sitting back. Facebook and Twitter are waging war on social spam. Facebook says, each day the site blocks 200 million malicious actions, such as links to malware.
Facebook has a team of 30 workers who spend hours combing the site for user-reported spam (up from just 4 in 2008), in addition to 46 people working in security as well as 300 people focused on user issue.
Twitter, on the other hand, has only two programmers fighting spam, but it plans to add five more by the end of the year, and another nine account abuse specialists.
With over 800 million users, preventing spam is an uphill battle for site like Facebook, but they are determined to fight the good fight.
We, as users of these networking sites, what is our contribution in this fight against social spam? I believe we can at least take the advice of Chester Wisniewski, Senior Security Advisor at Sophos Inc.
Aside from relying on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Google to do a “good job” the best most people can do is implement a good web security filter to look for malicious or spammy URLs and prevent your browser from going to content that may be harmful.”
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