Facebook said today that they are continuing an investigation into the source of some wildly inappropriate content that showed up on users’ newsfeeds over the last few days.
The content in question is said to have included videos, photos, and links involving pornography, graphic violence, bestiality, a dead dog, and self mutilation. According to Facebook, the content was a result of a coordinated spam attack.
It’s unknown at this time who is responsible for this coordinated attack, however, a group claiming to be affiliated with the hacker group Anonymous said last week that they had created a Fawkes virus, named after Guy Fawkes, who planned the failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605 against the English parliament. Over the summer, Anonymous had put out a call (weakly withdrawn later) to hackers to attack Facebook on Guy Fawkes day, which is celebrated in England (and by some English descendants) on November 5th. But the 5th came and went without word of an attack. But the timing of this attack, which started several days ago, raises suspicions.
While Facebook says it is still investigating, they have also said that they have “drastically limited the damage caused by this attack.” They have declined to say how many users may have experienced the inappropriate content. The social media company also stated “We’ve built enforcement mechanisms to quickly shut down the malicious pages and accounts that attempt to exploit it.”
While who did this is not known, Facebook is now shedding some light on how it was done. In a statement released earlier today, Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes said “During this spam attack, users were tricked into pasting and executing malicious javascript in their browser URL bar causing them to unknowingly share this offensive content. Our engineers have been working diligently on this self-XSS vulnerability in the browser.”
