185 days
Facebook's porn attack: Lawmaker wants answers
The biggest mystery behind the porn-and-gore spam spree on Facebook isn't how it happened or who's behind it, but rather that of the human heart.
Most of us have been on Facebook long enough to know better, yet there are still users who cannot resist cutting and pasting malicious code into their browsers, spreading the XSS (or cross-site scripting ) spam that even now continues to dribble profane pictures here and there in News Feeds.
Such an esoteric excuse isn't good enough for Rep. Mary Bono Mack, R-Calif., who wants her people to meet with Facebook's people "to make certain — to the extent possible — that it doesn't happen again," Ken Johnson, a spokesman for Bono Mack, said in an email response to The Hill.
Graphic pornography and bloody dead bodies of humans and animals were among the shocking fare Facebook users found themselves subjected to earlier this week when the world's largest social network battled "a coordinated spam attack that exploited a browser vulnerability," Facebook said in a statement.
"We've put in place backend measures to reduce the rate of these attacks and will continue to iterate on our defenses to find new ways to protect people."
At the end of the week, anecdotal reports of offensive material popping up in Facebook News Feeds were still coming in. "Even though Facebook said it had eliminated most of the Bieber smut and gore pics from user's walls, users are still complaining about graphic pictures on Twitter, at a rate of about five or six per minute," Gawker reported on Thursday.
On Friday morning, Technolog received several screenshots of pornography from readers who told us it's still showing up on their Facebook profiles. The XSS scam is as common as Facebook scams come, spread largely because of insatiably curious users tricked into copying and pasting offending JavaScript into a vulnerable browser.
While naked people and blood splatter grabs the headlines and the attention of Rep. Bono Mack, less sensational XSS and clickjacking scams, such as tricking Facebook users into clicking on "Why were you tagged in this video?" or pasting code into browsers in the hopes of getting a free meal at Olive Garden, are so quickly forgotten they're often repeated.
Unlike most Facebook scams that hijack user accounts and spam their friends, this one doesn't seem to have a financial motive — nobody's tricked into looking at advertising, for example. The purely malicious nature of the attack has caused some to speculate that the hacker collective Anonymous is behind it, but there currently is no proof to support that theory.
Appearing to take a stand on porn and violence is always a win for politicians however, so the only surprise about Rep. Bono Mack's interest is that she wasn't instantly joined by other politicians in this particular beef against the social network. (Notably, other lawmakers as well as the feds are already occupied with ongoing investigations into Facebook's privacy practices.)
According to The Hill, "The Facebook officials will meet with Bono Mack's aides for the Energy and Commerce Committee's subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade, which she chairs."
More on the annoying way we live now:
- Facebook user or not, you're being tracked
- Facebook's porn and gore attack: Who gets the blame?
- Fidel Castro's niece trolled in Twitter debut
Helen A.S. Popkin goes blah blah blah about the Internet. Tell her to get a real job on Twitter and/or Facebook. Also, Google+.
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