Saturday, February 4, 2012

Fake Facebook accounts

Yesterday Barracuda Labs released amusing infographic about fake Facebook account characteristics.  Some interesting stats were most of fake accounts were created using female identity and often those fake accounts did not have consistent status update history.



I wrote about fake Facebook accounts in September 2010 and how they were used by spammers to create spammy status updates.  Although fake Facebook account is still a problem, I couldn't find obvious fake accounts created in English when I did random searches on youropenbook.org.

Back in 2010, it used to be easy to spot obvious fake accounts by running a search on youropenbook.org.  You could tell by looking at their status update and sharing.  Most fake accounts were used to share sponsored articles, as it was in the examples of Techcrunch article about Angelgate back in September 2010.

However, there seems to be still many foreign fake accounts, accounts created with foreigner's identity.  Often these accounts are linked to one another creating fake social clique.  One thing that has not changed from earlier is most of these fake accounts have attractive female profile photos.

I have to think that spammers must have gotten lot more sophisticated in their approach in spreading their message on Facebook.  With increasing active monthly user base, Facebook has become even more attractive target platform for spammers to exploit, and that would create more headaches for Facebook.  But it would be a good news for social network security vendors.

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