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By Jennifer Leggio | January 27, 2011, 8:57am PST
Looks like spammers are taking advantage of one of social networking?s weakest links: narcissism.
Narcissism fuels ?friend collecting,? which is the practice of either aggressively pursuing connections with friends of friends one barely knows, or indiscriminately accepting friend requests from unknown people. Oftentimes, the latter users check mutual friends prior to admitting a requester into their Facebook lives. This is a terrible attempted safety measure because the mutual friends might have already been duped into the add. Now, friend collectors are being taken to task by spammers who take advantage of their social networking na?vet?.
With help from Tom Eston, senior security consultant from SecureState, I dug into these scams.
Here?s how it works: Spammer creates a fake account.
Spammer friends popular people on Facebook. The most popular users tend to have more than 2,500 ?friends? and are less discriminating with their friend adds.
Spammer tags the people that have accepted them as their friend on their profile picture.
Friends of the person tag see this picture in their news feeds, which in the case of the below example, might persuade a click-through since the fake profile photo is usually that of a cute girl (clearly, a ?super uber bored? one).
Looks like spammers are taking advantage of one of social networking?s weakest links: narcissism.
Narcissism fuels ?friend collecting,? which is the practice of either aggressively pursuing connections with friends of friends one barely knows, or indiscriminately accepting friend requests from unknown people. Oftentimes, the latter users check mutual friends prior to admitting a requester into their Facebook lives. This is a terrible attempted safety measure because the mutual friends might have already been duped into the add. Now, friend collectors are being taken to task by spammers who take advantage of their social networking na?vet?.
With help from Tom Eston, senior security consultant from SecureState, I dug into these scams.
Here?s how it works: Spammer creates a fake account.
Spammer friends popular people on Facebook. The most popular users tend to have more than 2,500 ?friends? and are less discriminating with their friend adds.
Spammer tags the people that have accepted them as their friend on their profile picture.
Friends of the person tag see this picture in their news feeds, which in the case of the below example, might persuade a click-through since the fake profile photo is usually that of a cute girl (clearly, a ?super uber bored? one).
Continued with Screen Shots & more information
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