Escalating numbers of Facebook users are reportedly being flooded with graphic images containing pornography, violence, self-mutilation and bestiality. The issue was first reported a couple of days ago, in a limited number of accounts, but reports are beginning to appear suggesting the problem is more widespread than initially thought.
The Christian Post, one of the first to break the news said, "some of the hacks happen in the form of 'click' spam being sent out. A popular spam involves Kim Kardashian with a link to a video. It will say something like 'after watching this video I lost all respect for Kim.' Upon clicking, the link takes the unsuspecting person nowhere, and hacks the account sending the same spam to all of the user’s friends."
They also pointed out that other spam tricks involved sending mass messages and tagged photos misleading people into believing they were somehow involved in the content. Interacting with the spam leads to the same result of yours and others' walls being spammed with the aforementioned images.
"I have 5000 friends. My feed is littered with porn. I can’t even check my news feed with anyone around because of it. Just saw one with a guy who had his skull bashed in and his brains on the street. Another one was the devil… Besides the countless naked girls. I’m about ready to deactivate," said actress and director Courtney Zito when speaking to the Post.
Affected users of the dominant social networking site are outraged, with many threatening to delete accounts. A similar problem with rampaging spam led in large part to the downturn of MySpace several years ago. At the time, many people affected by the problems moved over to the "more secure" Facebook networking site.
As the problem worsens people are pointing the finger at the hacktivist group Anonymous as being to blame, and that the rumoured "fawkes Virus" is responsible for the outbreak of unsolicited vile images popping up in peoples' profile news feeds. The attack on Facebook does not have the usual feel of Anonymous though - the hacking collective usually target sites with DDoS attacks, not let loose viruses. There is also no current evidence to suggest Facebook is infected with the Anonymous linked virus either.
Who exactly is causing this is still uncertain, but Facebook are likely to have their work cut out resolving this latest issue amid growing anger from its users. This comes less than two weeks afterresearchers engineered social-bots to steal 250GB of Facebook users' data.
