Tuesday"s rash of pornographic and violent images on the News Feeds of some Facebook users was caused by a script that took advantage of an exploit in some web browsers, according to a statement from Facebook spokesperson Frederic Wolens. CNN.com reports that according to Wolens, Facebook"s team of engineers has now "eliminated most of the spam caused by this attack". He added, "We are now working to improve our systems to better defend against similar attacks in the future."
While there was speculation that the porno spam attack on Facebook was caused by a direct cyber attack, Wolens claims the real culprit was a malicious script that some Facebook users were apparently tricked into adding into its URL address bars on their web browsers. The script caused the user to share the images generated by the exploit onto their News Feed.
So far there"s no word on who might be responsible for sharing this web browser exploit although some have speculated it might be a splinter group from the hacker organization Anonymous. Facebook has now reportedly created code that shuts down the pages that are sharing the pornographic links.
Obviously the lesson for everyone is don"t cut and past code that you don"t know anything about into your web browser address bar. Also, it might be a good idea to make sure your web browser itself is up to date; safety first, after all. You can check out out the reactions to some of Neowin"s readers to this Facebook spam in our forum section.