One in Five Facebook Users Gets Spammed with Malicious URLs

According to a report from Romanian antivirus vendor BitDefender, around one in five Facebook users get malicious URLs in their news feeds on the social networking platform.

The data was gathered by the company's free Facebook security application dubbed safego, which was released on October 26.

Once installed in a Facebook account, the app scans links posted on the user's wall, as well as those in their friends' messages.

The destination of these links are checked against the company's database, which contains threat data collected from all of the company's products.

Safego also scans users' privacy settings and makes suggestions on how to secure their profile and information.

CNET reports that 20 percent of Facebook users who installed safego and scanned their profiles with it found malicious URLs in their news feeds.

In sixty percent of cases, these were sent by rogue Facebook apps, which are commonly used as a scam propagation method on the platform.

In fact, the most popular type of rogue apps (21.5%) detected by safego were the ones offering nonexistent and prohibited Facebook features to users, like the ability to see their profile visitors or who blocked them.

Next on the list of top attack apps were those luring users with free items in Facebook games (15.4%), then those offering bonus features like custom backgrounds and dislike buttons (11.2%), those advertising copies of new games (7.1%), free cellphones (5.4%) and free movies (1.3%).

We have seen and reported about these lures being used in scams on multiple occasions and, unfortunately, their constant re-occurrence suggests that they are successful in tricking users.

Currently, BitDefender's safego app has some 21,817 monthly active users, which is not very statistically relevant when compared to Facebook's over 500 million user base.

However, it still stands to show how widespread these scams are. Security experts have longs said that the company has to pay more attention to security and not just accessibility when designing features, otherwise the network will become a hotspot for spam and malware attacks.