I don’t know about you but I have started getting spam through Facebook. So far it isn’t the classical type of spam selling viagra etc.  I have however been getting friend requests from attractive young ladies with exotic names. 

I also seem to be inundated with notifications of rubbish that I have no interest in checking out.

I was discussing this with Dave Ward, one of our Tech Consultants, who mentioned that Fortinet have now brought out Spam2.0 filters for their firewalls.  Social Networking sites have started having their vulnerabilities exploited. 

People are getting spammed with direct messages, apparently from friends.  Facebook chat, for example, is one way used to insert worms onto someone’s PC and thence onto your network.

Fortinet has an application that allows companies to let employees access Facebook whilst blocking access to applications such as chat known to be vunerable.  Screenshot below. You might need to click a couple of times on the picture to get it to a viewable size/quality.  Also check out the recent Wikipedia article on Social Networking Spam.

PS Don’t get me wrong here.  I am a happily married man and whilst I’m sure I quite like being chatted up by nice young ladies one has to ask why complete strangers, whose interests seem to be dating and meeting members of the opposite sex, would want to approach me…