Facebook Repurposed As Pornbook

Facebook has gone public with the news that hackers have apparently introduced a virus which leads to explicit adult content and violent images, FOX News is reporting.

Many unsuspecting users are clicking links, videos and pictures which open the sometimes ghastly content, including celebrities like Justin Bieber engaged in sick acts such as Photoshopped pornography and even bestiality.

Facebook became aware of the problem on Monday and is taking steps to wipe the viral porn content from its systems, but already many users are saying this is the last straw and are closing their accounts.

Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes told FoxNews.com, “We are always working to improve our systems to isolate and remove material that violates our terms. Protecting the people who use Facebook from spam and malicious content is a top priority for us.”

The backlash is also being felt on Twitter where many users who have seen the content are venting their frustration.

The suspicious content is disguised as harmless looking links and when a user clicks on them the porn content is unleashed through malicious code. So far, there is no word on how users can safeguard themselves, other than to open only trusted and known content.

Hopefully Facebook will find the code and remove it. The thought of innocent children seeing this stuff is frightening. If Facebook is unable to control this kind of activity, it may be the one kind of enemy which actually has the means of taking the social networking giant down.

Source: NewsGather

Sophos writes:

The content, which includes explicit hardcore porn images, photoshopped photos of celebrities such as Justin Bieber in sexual situations, pictures of extreme violence and even a photograph of an abused dog, have been distributed via the site – seemingly without the knowledge of users.

Although a Facebook rep was not immediately available for comment, the company has already confirmed the attack with a number of blogs. For example, Mashable writes that Facebook has acknowledged a “coordinated spam attack” that tricked users into copying and pasting “malicious jacascript in their browser URL.”

Detailing how they are dealing the attack, Facebook provided Mashable with the following statement:

During this spam attack users were tricked into pasting and executing malicious javascript in their browser URL bar causing them to unknowingly share this offensive content. Our engineers have been working diligently on this self-XSS vulnerability in the browser. We’ve built enforcement mechanisms to quickly shut down the malicious Pages and accounts that attempt to exploit it. We have also been putting those affected through educational checkpoints so they know how to protect themselves. 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.

Computerworld notes that some believe the browser exploit was written by members of hacker-activist collective Anonymous. Back in August, Anonymous was allegedly planning to attack Facebook on November 5, but that deadline came and went without incident; in addition, several individuals believed to be associated with Anonymous have denied involvement in the planning of a so-called “Operation Facebook”.