Lies, fake news about Facebook and outright scams have grown more common on the giant social network than weeds in a Farmville player’s fields. Now the problem has reached the very top of the organization, with one of only four members of Facebook’s hyper-exclusive Board of Directors apparently handing his account credentials over to a service that started spamming his friends with a fake offer of a “Facebook phone number.” If a guy like that falls for it, who can blame little old you or me if we fall for such a scam, too?

Apparently the Board Member, investor Jim Breyer, has had his Facebook account suspended over the spam. “Users whose accounts have been compromised are put through a remediation process, where they must take steps to re-secure their account and learn security best practices,” a Facebook official told leading financial industry blog PEHub yesterday, “This is what happened with Mr. Breyer’s account.” If Facebook becomes all the more awash in scams and spams, this may be a key symbol of when the tide turned and it became too much.

In as much as Facebook has brought push-button publishing and social graph technology to hundreds of millions of people around the world for the first time – this is a big challenge the company is going to have to deal with in order for its service to have maximum, long-lasting impact on our culture.

Can Facebook kill the spam? Facebook does have a unique advantage over email, the company points out. When a message from a source is discovered to be spammy, the company can zap it system-wide all at once. Apparently that’s only proven so effective so far, though.

If every social network rises and falls, though, effectively tackling this problem may be important to protecting the Facebook user experience from “pulling a MySpace.” When the problem reaches the very top of the company, it may be time to be concerned.

MySpace took big steps to kill spam years ago, but not until it was too late and the company’s reputation was set. Can Facebook save itself from a similar fate? We’ll see.

You’ve probably read or heard about KOOBFACE malware propagating through social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. A lot of analysis is available online through blogs or malware descriptions. But I bet most of you probably still do not know some or all of these things about KOOBFACE.

1. KOOBFACE knows: KOOBFACE has the capability to steal whatever information is available in your Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter profile. Profile pages of these social networking sites may contain information about one’s contact details (address, email, phone), interests (hobbies, favorite things), affiliations (organizations, universities), and employment (employer, position, salary). So beware, KOOBFACE knows a lot!
2. KOOBFACE doesn’t just know you through your profile information, they also know what you look like!: Not only does the botnet steal profile information, it also makes sure to put a face to the name by getting one’s profile picture as well.
3. URLs leading to KOOBFACE malware are either in compromised or free Web hosting sites: Yep, call them cheap but the guys behind KOOBFACE are making good use of compromised and free Web hosting sites in spamming KOOBFACE-related URLs. These URLs are spammed in social networking sites with catch phrases like “funny video,” which lead to a fake YouTube or Facebook site, which then leads to KOOBFACE malware.
4. KOOBFACE zombies are made into Web servers on top of being social networking site spammers: KOOBFACE installs a Web server component into infected machines, which effectively makes the infected machine part of the malware’s distribution network. Infected machines serve fake YouTube or Facebook pages, which then lead to the KOOBFACE malware.
5. KOOBFACE zombies are able to distribute repackaged versions of the malware: KOOBFACE Web servers are able to use UPX, a popular executable packer program, to pack (compress) the KOOBFACE binaries they serve.
6. Half of KOOBFACE infections occur in the United States: This is not surprising since majority of the social networking site users reside in the United States.
7. KOOBFACE is able to block IP addresses: Probably in an effort to protect itself against takedown or snooping by curious researchers, KOOBFACE implemented a blockIP routine where traffic coming from a particular IP range is blocked.
8. KOOBFACE is able to defeat Facebook’s spam filtering: Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter have recently implemented a spam-filtering mechanism where known spam URLs are blocked. KOOBFACE tries to circumvent this by first testing if a KOOBFACE spam URL is blocked by Facebook or not.

So there, some things you may not know about KOOBFACE. If you would like to read some more about KOOBFACE, check out the article over at Wikipedia here. So while you may not have been one of the ones to be infected by it, there is a good chance you have come across it before either from a friend’s infected account or just some random person who happened to target you after getting infected themselves. While it isn’t the nastiest worm out there, it is defiantly doing some damage so if you get some weird link from a friend on a social networking site, play it safe and please do not click on it!

Ok, so lately I have been looking at ways to help increase the traffic to the website and came up with a few ideas. While I was exploring some options I happened to come across some stuff that got me interested in setting up a proxy (proxy.andrewsayshello.com) on the site for anonymous web surfing. I know this type of this is very popular with kids in highschool and college as the schools try and block certain websites such as Facebook.com or Myspace.com. (Because that will keep the kids focused in class if they do!)

Well after doing some research and trying a few different methods of setting a proxy up (not to mention all the frustration of getting it working correctly) I was finally able to get a PHP based web proxy up and running on the site. Even after I had it working I was still reading up on some things about the proxy because it wasn’t as fast as I wanted it to be (I hate having to use slow proxies) so I totally re-did the entire thing to make it faster and use CGI instead of PHP.

So about an hour and a half later I finally got it all setup and working how I liked it. I am pretty pleased at how fast it is and there are not really many advertisements at all. There are a few on the actual site of the proxy, but once you start using the proxy itself, there are ZERO ads displayed from the proxy itself. Now this doesn’t mean if a website has ads you won’t see them (you won’t see them if you check the option) but I have decided not to have any ads within the proxy itself while surfing with it to help keep it moving along as fast as possible!

Well this post didn’t end up being a very long one as the main goal was to just let everyone know about the proxy I have gotten setup for everyone to use. So before I start to just type about nothing I am quitting now!

Proxy – proxy.andrewsayshello.com

It seems as though Facebook.com just won a lawsuit they had filed against a huge spammer that has been taking advantage of facebook and its users. This user and his company “Atlantis Blue Capital” have been sending out spam messages through the message system that facebook has for its users, but he has used it to send out mass spam messages to users to link to his sites where he was obviously trying to make some easy money with. Here is a statement from Facebook:

Does Facebook expect to quickly collect $873 million and share the proceeds in some way with our users? Alas, no. It’s unlikely that Geurbuez and Atlantis Blue Capital could ever honor the judgment rendered against them (though we will certainly collect everything we can). But we are confident that this award represents a powerful deterrent to anyone and everyone who would seek to abuse Facebook and its users.

Just earlier this year Facebook’s rival won a similar case which landed them $230 million against the so-called “Spam King” under similar circumstances. (You can read the arcticle about it here!) Besides the huge chunk of money that he is now required to pay to Facebook, this person is also banned for life from the website and officials are hoping that this decision will help in deter other people / companies from trying the same thing. But given the difficulty of enforcing such laws around the world, its likely that spam will continue and they will just be coming from other parts of the world. (So you can expect some really bad english to be involved!)

Lastly here is a few examples of the messages he was sending out through facebook (with the URLs changed of course!)

Ringtones:

I finally found the best source out there for all the latest ringtines for my phone at http://www.spam THey dont sound bad like the ones from my actual phone company, these are 100 times better and they have thousands and thousands of ringers to choose from and when you use them the first time you get 20 free ringtones. Stop paying so much for your ringtones,don’t be a sucker, get them from my place, http://www.spam

Male Enhancement:

remember i told you about those pills that mike and his brother have been taking that made their pricks larger then life? well i finally got more info on whats been happening. mike have been taking the pills now for 6 months from http://www.spam and his brother about 3 months now. yesterday i found out that you know who has been taking them for the longest time now too, that blew me away. so the secret is out, these enlarge pills really work and more people then i realized are taking them daily. i am thinking of getting some for a certain someone today, they guarentee them 100 percent that they will work or every cent you paid back to you. http://www.spam

Marijuana:

hey, check this out! you know smoking bud? well there is this site http://www.spam that sells super potent legal bud, yes legal herbal bud for sale online, it doesn’t show up in drug tests or anything either, i started selling this stuff too and am making a killing, they ship it to you discreetly and it’s 100 percent money back guaranteed, this is the site http://www.spam it’s not illegal, but hurry up before they ban it in the states.

So there you have it, I’m sure a good many of the people who read this have probably seen these messages or others very similar to these but the good news is you won’t be seeing them anymore due to the concequences of this lawsuit that this company faces. So we will now get alittle time off from these types of messages until another user / company takes their place in the hopes of finding some loophole to make some quick cash! So be careful out there and watch what you click on!