Facebook decided that the best way to protect itself and its employees from hackers was to hack its own employees, and it did just that in October, holding its second annual “Hacktober.”
Friends of fans are a valuable group for many businesses on Facebook, and also the ones who see loads of advertising daily through sponsored stories, suggested posts, and promoted posts. While users are sometimes introduced to pages they end up liking, many times, posts from pages they haven’t connected with end up being unwanted messages. Social media expert Jon Loomer, in recent blog posts, explained how users aren’t shy about voicing their opinion and wrote about how brands can advertise to potential fans without aggravating them.
The Center for Information Assurance and Joint Forensics Research at the University of Alabama at Birmingham announced a $250,000 grant from Facebook Monday, and the funding comes not from the company’s coffers, but from money that Facebook has recovered from spammers around the world. The donation is in recognition of the center’s role in tracking international criminals behind social media botnet Koobface, as well as other spammers.
The University of California, Riverside created a free application to detect spam and malware on users’ Facebook walls, MyPageKeeper, coining a new term in the process: “socware,” a combination of social malware.
Facebook repaired a misconfiguration last week that briefly allowed spammers to obtain data on users’ friends and use those friends’ names on emails, but it’s now in the hands of email providers to locate and shut down the sources of the spam.
Any confused, challenged or perplexed Facebook user who heads over to the Facebook Help Center Forum is in for nothing but added frustration these days. That’s because a gang of slimy spammers has full-on infiltrated the forum center, originally built to capture and address user questions from authentic Facebookers, who’d be hard pressed to slip in an organic question now amid the “Watch Live!!!!” posts and threads of jumbled nonsensical emoticons.
When the Internet’s wide collection of pranksters decides to get together, it can be a nightmare for Facebook page administrators. Whoever runs Subway’s Facebook page is certainly earning their paycheck this week, as the page was bombarded Wednesday with animated pornographic images featuring the company’s logo and sandwiches.
Following its second-quarter earnings call last Thursday, Facebook filed its 10-Q quarterly document with the Securities and Exchange Commission Tuesday, addressing, among other topics, increased mobile usage, revenue from game developer Zynga, and the status of various lawsuits.
Page administrators can no longer mark comments as spam, instead only having the options after deleting comments to undo the deletion, report the comment, or ban the user.
Applications that promise to show Facebook users who has viewed their profiles have been around as long as Facebook itself, and despite countless warnings that they are fake, they live on, much like the emails from Nigerian oil company officials seeking recipients’ bank account information so they can transfer large amounts of money into them.
