BitDefender Reveals Dynamics Of Facebook Scam Landscape With Detailed Infographics

As an award-winning provider of innovative Internet security solutions, BitDefender revealed the dynamics of the Facebook (News - Alert) scam landscape using a detailed infographic report. The report takes note of the statistics provided by the free BitDefender tool, BitDefender safego, protecting network accounts against privacy risks, e-threats and spam, to provide details of the message types that are used to spread social scam. One of the most enticing bait among Facebook users is the “see who viewed your profile” message type that claims to show how popular the user profile is by providing the number of visitors.

A dictionary of social network malice can be developed using the most widely used spam words and phrases covered by the infographic. To offer valuable info on illegitimate applications’ spreading mechanism and potential click counts, the infographic has a dedicated section that covers spam wave case study. The Facebook scam victims are distributed across wide demographics and are illustrated in the report in the form of the Top 5 Busiest Scam Clicking Countries. To make users more aware and secure, the infographic provides detail working of several scam’s core mechanism with the recent inclusion of the "likejacking" phenomenon.

In a release, George Petre, BitDefender Threat Intelligence team leader said, “According to our statistics, stalker-like scams have collected approximately one million and a half click per wave. These figures help us find a possible explanation for the fact that these scams are increasingly cloned on other social platforms, such as Twitter.”

In a related story, BitDefender announced that social networks should become aware of a spate of holiday-inspired social scams and spams. BitDefender urges the users to exercise extra caution and not get caught up in scams that sound too good, putting user accounts at risk. Valentine’s cyber-scammers are increasingly targeting social networks to hijack user accounts or to simply flood them with spam. BitDefender’s safego and Malware City help users in keeping their social network accounts safe. BitDefender has listed some of the known scams which include messages that promise to share Valentine's Day insights; messages that promise to reveal the existence of secret admirers; and messages that help spread Valentine's versions of well-known Facebook scams.


Carolyn John is a Contributor to TMCnet. To read more of her articles, please columnist page.

Edited by Jennifer Russell