Email Scams on facebook, Facebook warns of spam

The social-networking company urged its 800 million-plus users to remain vigilant to keep their accounts from being hijacked. The recent spam attacks that flooded Facebook with pornographic and violent imagery are likely not the work of Anonymous, according to a security expert and a purported member of the hacker collective.

Facebook said Wednesday that it has stopped most of the spam that has flooded many users' pages with pictures showing graphic sex and violence. The content, which includes explicit hardcore porn images, photoshopped photos of celebrities such as Justin Bieber in sexual situations, pictures of extreme violence.

This is leading some to speculate that Anonymous is responsible for this, calling this outbreak the 'Fawkes Virus. I assure you that Anonymous involvement with this is highly untrue. That includes reporting suspicious links on friends' pages and not clicking on links that offer deals that are too good to be true.

Social-networking sites are popular targets for spammers because people are more likely to trust and share content that comes from people they know. The first, dubbed Operation Facebook, pledged to take down Facebook on Nov. 5, Guy Fawkes Day. That effort was later deemed a fake and Facebook was unaffected on Nov. 5. This makes spam, scams and viruses easy to spread.

The video likened the virus to Koobface, a virus that hit Facebook in 2008, and the voiceover said Anonymous would use the Fawkes Virus to tackle corruption and groups that oppose its organization. About 74 percent of email is spam, according to security firm Symantec, though the bulk gets filtered out before reaching the inbox.

The Pastebin post reiterated that Operation Facebook was not a legitimate threat and not tied to the recent spam. Over the past couple of days, many users have complained about finding links on their Facebook pages taking them to images depicting jarring violence and graphic pornography.

"The fake operation (Operation Facebook) had a goal to 'completely destroy Facebook' or take the site down off the web using forms of DDoS. So unless Operation Facebook changed its date of executing its purpose & changed its purpose entirely.

The content is then posted on the users' Facebook page, usually without their knowledge. It spreads further when their friends then click on those links, thinking that it was posted by the user on purpose. She pointed to the URL where people landed if they clicked on the offending Facebook links: laptop-rental-store.spammy_tld.

Recently, Anonymous has been focusing much of its efforts on the Occupy Wall Street movement.