Word: facebooked
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...Facebook monitors users' activity, and when someone goes from a few wall posts a week to hundreds of messages within a few minutes, the security team can logically assume that the account has been hacked. They'll notify the user, reset the password, and the whole issue is usually resolved within a few hours. But when thousands of users are hacked at once - and then their friends are hacked, and their friends' friends are hacked - it can take a few days for Facebook to fix the problem. That's what happened on April 29 and 30, when users found themselves...
...When MarkMonitor, an outside security company employed by Facebook, shut down the fake website, the scam popped up again on a different site, FBStarter.com. (It too has since been disabled.) "My guess is this was a pretty organized group of people," says Fred Felman, MarkMonitor's chief marketing officer. Felman says the phishers, whoever they were (Internet scammers almost never get caught), were not using the most up-to-date technology, but their creativity and speed makes him think that they have experience and will probably do it again...
...similar phishing scam established a toehold on the website in January. And last year hackers broke into accounts by convincing people to click on links posted on their profile walls. Another common Facebook scam is to hack someone's account and then send messages to friends asking for money (like the old Nigerian businessman scam, but with a hey-it's-your-old-pal twist...
...Facebook won't say how many accounts were compromised last week, but a rep notes that the site has never had a scammer hack more than a small fraction of its accounts, adding that the company's security team - which has more than 100 analysts, engineers and programmers - can handle whatever comes their way. "We're going to be attacked again in the future," says McGeehan, "and my role is to be prepared when it happens...
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