Infosecurity Europe: Impact of faux Facebook accounts detailed

The downturn in spam has resulted in an increase in "rogue direct marketing" on social networks.

Speaking to SC Magazine on the Infosecurity Europe conference in London, Wieland Alge, general manager EMEA at Barracuda Networks, said a mix of bringing down botnets, arrests and spam traps had resulted in a decline in traditional spam. However, this has ended in an increase by 3 times in spam on social networks.

He said: “We monitor mass attacks on social networks closely on Twitter and Facebook and both are in a critical state. Just one per cent of Twitter messages and 1.6 per cent on Facebook are bad, however the sheer amount of messages makes it [worrying].

“On Facebook, if one in 200 messages is spam, you'll read it and click the links. The rogue direct marketers are terrible spellers, however the click rate is huge end result of the small amount of text. They use automated clients and the success rate is very large.”

Barracuda Networks' chief research officer, Dr Paul Judge, said attacks have gone up significantly over the last two years and attackers are actually using Facebook's new implementations and APIs and creating fake pages to draw 'likes'.

“If one person likes a page, they are often tagged in a photograph with 50 folks. They've 5,000 friends so 250,000 people could be reached from one photo; for this reason it's so efficient,” he said.

“The photo has a comment and an outline that announces 'look at this girl' or 'remember this night' and there'll be a malicious link for apparently more pictures. It's a confidence thing and it's portion of Facebook; fake accounts account for one per cent of all profiles, while ten to 30 per cent aren't real people.”

Judge also said that Twitter continues to have fake accounts with huge amounts of malicious tweets sent, while new social networks akin to Pinterest and Foursquare haven't had one of these level of spam interest as yet.