Spammers are moving onto social-networking sites such as Facebook because they find e-mail increasingly unrewarding. Online-security firms stop more than 98% from reaching its target.
Typical junk mail comes from freelancers who are paid to direct traffic to websites that sell fake pills and counterfeit brands. But fraud and forgery are illegal. Instead of tricking consumers into a purchase, they are stealing their money directly. Links used to direct the gullible to a site selling counterfeits. Now they install “Trojan” software that ransacks hard drives for bank details and the like.
Nor is Facebook as safe as Mr Zuckerberg would wish. As an experiment, BitDefender, an online-security firm, set up fake profiles on the social network and asked strangers to enter into a digital friendship. They were able to create as many as 100 new friends a day. Offering a profile picture, particularly of a pretty woman, increased their odds. When the firm’s researchers expanded their requests to strangers who shared even one mutual friend, almost half accepted. Worse, a quarter of BitDefender’s new friends clicked on links posted by the firm, even when the destination was obscured.
Read more at The Economist
