Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Has Facebook been hacked?
In the last twelve hours I’ve received several identical (and supposedly personal) Facebook messages from legitimate friends urging me to check out an application that will identify who has a crush on me by sending text messages to my phone (I can only imagine the flood of spam and advertisements that this service has in mind).
It was just a matter of time before hackers and spammers directed their efforts at Facebook. One can only hope that Facebook is taking good care of the personal data based on the settings we have selected within their ‘privacy settings’. Would there be any reason to doubt them?
April 23rd, 2008 at 7:05 am
I’ve received the same message. And its coming from users who I would think would be quite responsible about the apps they add to their facebook account. I look forward to finding out the source of this spam.
April 23rd, 2008 at 7:14 am
I got the same message yesterday .. I knew it couldn’t have been from my friend because the subject and the language were all wrong — he doesn’t write like that. Got another a few months ago selling telephone services. So yes, I am sure the spammers are in Facebook.
April 23rd, 2008 at 7:19 am
In an open system like general email, you expect this kind of problem. For a closed system that is trying to sell itself as being concerned about user privacy, this does not bode well.
My specific concern is that it could do a lot of credibility damage to some folks if their account is exploited by spammers to reach their entire ‘friend’ community. You don’t recover from that easily.
April 23rd, 2008 at 7:20 am
I got the message too, it has to be something in an application. Can’t see any other way, suck that everyone thinks that the guys at Facebook wrote it so tight that it can’t be “hacked” but it was. I hope I didn’t add the application that is sending this spam. I’d like to know which it is!
April 23rd, 2008 at 9:38 am
And here we were, thinking we had convinced Aunt Mabel not to click on unknown emails on her PC.. but we didn’t tell Mabel about facebook apps. I don’t blame facebook (for once)..
A big chunk of whatever was on a personal PC on 2005 is now on facebook or other web services.. Doesn’t matter if it’s a local file, or a “Hug your favourite wombat” link, people are click-happy, and they will continue to click until they get burned…
Plus ca change….
April 23rd, 2008 at 10:53 am
With all of the coding they have done, with all of the integration and promotion, with all of the money behind it and the predictive behavioural and consumer data they’ve collected, I’m surprised that Facebook hasn’t developed the digital intelligence to prevent and control this type of activity — even if it does stem from user clicks.
April 23rd, 2008 at 2:30 pm
ok, so my facebook has been sending random messages to people but i have never clicked on anything or even gotten a message. so i think my facebook has a virus or something can anyone help me fix it?
August 12th, 2008 at 9:42 pm
Don’t open it because I did and I ended up having my facebook hacked. A little while after you open it they’ll change you password but they’ll keep your email. DON’T OPEN IT