Facebook probes porn spam

Nov 15, 2011, 17:43 GMT

San Francisco - Facebook is probing a malicious exploit that is filling users' inboxes with violent and pornographic images, the social networking site said Tuesday.

The spam spreads by masquerading as a link to a new Facebook video chat feature, or other news stories. It actually downloads a file that uses the victim's news feed to spread the obscene images to the victim's friends.

Some of the images include photoshopped images of Justin Bieber and other celebrities performing sex acts, as well as pictures of extreme violence and even a dead dog.

Security experts said that the attack may be the work of the hacker group Anonymous which threatened to target the social networking site earlier this month.

Researcher Graham Cluley said the images started flooding the network on Tuesday. 'What's clear,' Cluley wrote, 'is that mischief-makers are upsetting many Facebook users and making the social networking site far from a family-friendly place.'

'We have recently experienced an increase in reports and we are investigating and addressing the issue,' Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes said in a statement. 'Protecting the people who use Facebook from spam and malicious content is a top priority for us and we are always working to improve our systems to isolate and remove material that violates our terms.' he said.