Asks users for more help and understanding

Jun 30, 2010 09:45 GMT  ·  By

Facebook has explained its spam prevention mechanisms in more detail in a post on the official blog, encouraging users to be more pro-active in reporting abuse and understanding when the automatic systems make mistakes.

Being the largest social network and the second most trafficked website on the Internet, after Google, Facebook's privacy and security policies are always put under the microscope. Traditional software vendors like Microsoft or Adobe can stand as examples that being popular always works both ways - the larger your product's user-base is, the more it will ne targeted by cybercriminals. And this also holds true on the Internet.

With over 400 million registered users, Facebook is the ultimate hunting grounds for cybercriminals. Well-crafted malware distribution campaigns, affiliate marketing scams, online pharmacy spam, and many other types of attacks are targeting Facebook users every day, via a wide array of social engineering tricks.

"We take these deliberate spam attacks seriously and devote a tremendous amount of our engineering time and talent to build systems that detect suspicious activity and automatically warn people about inappropriate behavior or links. Every once in a while, though, people misunderstand one of these systems," Caroline Ghiossi, a member of Facebook's user operations team, explains. She points out that in order to avoid this, the website has been working on more descriptive and clear warning windows.

According to Ghiossi, Facebook's spam filter is capable of behavioral analysis. This mechanism automatically detects suspicious behavior patterns like sending the same message to a large number of users who are not in the sender's friends list during a short period of time. When such protections are triggered, the offending user automatically receives a warning to stop.

Another anti-spam protection comes under the form of a URL blacklist. If a URL is added to this list, users will no longer be able to include it in messages. If they attempt to do so, they will receive a notification explaining why the URL is blocked and will be given the option to appeal the decision. Additionally, if a URL shortener is abused long enough during a mass attack, the ability to use that service on Facebook might be temporarily suspended.

However, despite Facebook's efforts in filtering out the malicious content, enough spam still makes its way onto the social network. Just yesterday, we reported about a new affiliate marketing scam that started spreading amongst users and the gang behind the infamous Koobface worm managed to find new ways around Facebook's protection mechanisms for a long time.

"Just as a community relies on its citizens to report crime, we rely on you to let us know when you encounter spam, which can be anything from a friend request sent by someone you don't know to a message that includes a link to a malicious website," advises Caroline Ghiossi.