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Spammers exploit another Facebook flaw

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Spammers have taken advantage of a vulnerability in Facebook to spread auto-replicating links, a trick that makes it possible to spread crud without using social engineering.

Simply clicking on any application spam links was enough to "share" the application to the user's wall, net security firm F-Secure explains, adding that the links had stopped working by late on Monday.

While Facebook has contained this threat, others along the same lines are likely to follow, not least because spammers have taken to web 2.0 sites as channels for crud promotion or (increasingly) to distribute survey scams.

For example, comment spam promoting a survey that supposedly offered an iPad as a prize for completion was brazenly posted to a YouTube channel maintained by Sophos earlier this week, as illustrated by a blog post here. ®

Agentless Backup is Not a Myth

Follow the Money & Cut the Connection

The spam links (and spam emails) are not the problem. It's the people who buy stuff advertised from spam-linked websites that are the problem.

If it's illegal to feed the pigeons in Trafalgar Square (and it is) then it should also be illegal to buy stuff advertised by spam. Find these customers and ban them from the net.

Seriously. Enough with this shit.

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I'm forever hiding updates from apps...

As my co-workers discover more and more pointless ways to waste time, that's more app updates hidden. My hide list is quite large. But god forbid FB do something useful like "Hide all app updates". I really really don't want to know my boss's latest score in, what was it, marble mania? It's enough knowing she plays it, without being spammed by her latest high score.

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privacy by default?

of course if Facebook actually implemented decent granular and private by default settings for applications etc then this could not have happened... but they're so busy mining the social graph to try and prop up their business model that their walled garden is getting a vermin problem

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