Complaints from over 800-million users has prompted Facebook to take a serious look at its defences against spam after a recent wave of inappropriate images appeared on the social network over the past week.
The weak safety and security defences meant that children as young as 13 (Facebook’s minimum age requirement) were privy to pornography and scenes of violence on the news feed. The excuse given by Facebook is that a web browser vulnerability meant that the attackers could freely upload the content unnoticed by Facebook, leading to a number of naive users clicking on the suspect links and images spreading the offensive content further.
The attack is thought to be purely malicious, and Facebook suggests that no user account or a data was compromised. The social web also suggests that users keep an up-to-date browser version and never share unknown code on the news feed. Basically passing the blame on to the user.
It had been suggested that hacker group Anonymous would wipe out the social network on November 5th, but these attacks are not the groups style and they recently struck out against inappropriatness on the internet when the threatened child-abuse supporting web hosts.
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