Do you accept people you don’t know as friends on Facebook? If so, it could lead to trouble down the road. Facebook, which filed for IPO this week, has become an important part of personal and business communication, which makes it a target for cyber criminals of all types.
One tool they use are fake accounts which can then be used in a variety of ways to distribute spam or mount attacks on legitimate users, says security firm Barracuda Networks, which has done a study that can help you spot a fake trying to friend you on the site.
Facebook consistently fights to keep attackers out of its network, most recently announcing its lawsuit against a marketing firm accused of “spreading spam through misleading and deceptive tactics.” The Barracuda Labs study provides yet another example of this “arms race” as an increasing number of attackers move to social networks to carry out their wares.
Highlighted findings from the Barracuda Labs study include:
- Almost 60 percent of fake accounts claim to be bisexual, 10 times more than real users
- Fake accounts have six times more friends than real users, 726 versus 130
- Fake accounts use photo tags over 100 times more than real users, 136 tags per four photos versus one tag per four photos
- Fake accounts almost always (97 percent) claim to be female, as opposed to 40 percent for real users
“Likes, News Feeds and Apps have helped lead Facebook to its social network dominance and now attackers are harnessing those same features to efficiently scale their efforts,” said Dr. Paul Judge, chief research officer at Barracuda Networks.
“These fake profiles and apps give attackers a long-lived path to continuously present malicious links to innocent users.”
“Also, researchers have shown how friending malicious accounts can lead to account takeover using Facebook’s trusted friend account recovery,” Judge continued. “We have analyzed thousands of fake accounts to determine features and patterns that distinguish them from real users, and created a feature-based heuristic engine to distinguish real users from fake profiles.”
The study analyzes data collected from Barracuda Profile Protector, a free tool that analyzes and blocks malicious activity on Facebook and Twitter, along with public data collected from streams and network crawling to demonstrate how users typically operate.
Barracuda created this inforgraphic to illustrate the study results:
