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back to article Rogue apps 'worst Facebook feed malware baddies'

Stats from social networking safety apps suggest that one in five items on the news feeds of Facebook users lead to malicious content. More than three in five (60 per cent) of these attacks come from notifications generated by malicious third-party applications on Facebook's developer platform, according to Romanian-based net …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    ahh, Websense...

    Home of the malformed URLs that I block on a regular basis.

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  2. Elmer Phud

    Really?

    "one in five items on the news feeds"

    Hmm, not on mine -- I'd say about zero.

    In fact I've yet to even see a dodgy link on my newsfeed.

    Maybe, just maybe, it's down to what people subscribe to rather than a blanket spamming of newsfeeds.

    And maybe, just maybe, the clue lies in "Romanian-based net security firm BitDefender"

    Facebook is once agan getting the same sort of flak that used to be attributed to email but it's still down to users to click on things or to reply to things they've not read through carefully.

    The sky has not fallen in, the four horsepersons of the Apocalypse are still in the pub.

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  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Personally i think...

    Personally i think if you are daft enough to fall for them you deserve it, think darwin for facebook :p

    But in a more serious tone, social networking was always going to be the new way of distributing rouge software as its awash with 12 year olds with no netsense extreme example

    Little johnny is surfing facebook on mommys work laptop

    Little johnny sees a add on his friends wall for free mario on your facebook page

    Little johnny clicks the link and nothing happens its just a blank page

    Mommy does her online banking her details are stolen her company goes bust they lose the house and little johnny is taken into care.

    extreme but nearly doable with really bad security settings these days.

    A better way of doing this is educating children in net safety i haven't had a single spyware/malware/scareware on my system in years, but the missus is awash with crap and is cleaned weekly because she has no sense of whats dodgy and whats not.

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  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Thanks for doing the maths

    > three in five (60 per cent)

    I would never have worked that out on my own...

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    1. Mitch Kent
      Reply Icon

      The Mensa site once had a similar statistic

      They had "2% (1 in 50) can join...."

      I just checked but they've removed it since then. You would think those who even know what Mensa is would probably be able to work it out...

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      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        better still

        My daughters High School, [ we have "Specialist Status for Mathematics and Computing and therefore pride ourselves on providing an education which uses new technologies to enhance and support our students' learning, and aim to use our specialism to challenge and inspire every student in our school. ] had a website stating : "we run a four house system : Dane, ----,-----,-----,----- ( i forget )"

        The Head was a bit miffed when i asked what Grade one gets for a 125% pass in Maths.

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  5. JaitcH
    FAIL

    Do we really care if FB can't look after it's housekeeping?

    What else should users expect from FB?

    It doesn't care about users, it only wants to make money from them.

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  6. Anonymous Coward
    Pirate

    an example

    i meant to send in this pic to the reg a few days ago...here is an example of the dodgy stuff spewed by rouge apps

    http://img832.imageshack.us/img832/7053/facebookvirusedit.png

    obviously i can see its dodgy (random generated app name... gibberish link?) but ive been seeing it happen alot more the past week and i can imagine a few people are falling for it

    it only takes one clueless friend and you'll get stuff like this too! lol

    (note: im assuming this is malicious... i didn't actually visit the link and i don't plan too... at least on my own network ;) )

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