New Facebook Scams Entice Unsuspecting Users

 Read more from Dean

A top priority for any social networking site is engagement and interaction, and as the number of friends grow for their users, these sites are constantly developing tools that will target appropriate content to the user.

Scammers traditionally targeted their efforts toward a mass audience instead of more personalised content. This was often due to the limitations of filters available. However, both Facebook and Google+ have launched highlighted content filtering, which has resulted in a large drop of impersonal content in the ‘newsfeeds’ of its members.

Both Facebook and Twitter have made major changes in recent months in their design, privacy and security. The result has reduced the amount of large-scale scams, but may have opened the door to more personalised targeted attacks.

Facebook Changes in Detail

Timeline, recently launched by Facebook, is becoming mandatory soon for all users. It has been the most important update ever launched by the company. The reason for this is that the concept of privacy has been redefined. Even the smallest of details can now be publicly shared and indexed, for each user.

Up until these changes took place, we were still able to share information about our hobbies, relationships and work, but it was never indexed in a way that makes it easier for people to see and search.

While Timeline allows users to avoid content they don’t find interesting, it also provides scammers the opportunity to develop targeted content.

Lists defined to help control content sharing and content consumption, together with ‘close friends’ lists, increase the visibility of content for the people listed in these groups.

But, for scammers, this functionality offers the opportunity to create highly visible, targeted attacks.  Malicious applications can request the “read friend lists” permission and then distribute attacks to your close friends and even your family.

Since these attacks are not wide-spread for all Facebook users, they can be very difficult to identify and remove.

The ‘privacy settings’ within Facebook have also gone through a major overhaul. Users do have a lot more control over the content they share. However, with the ‘automatic opt-in’ for features such as tagging and location sharing, unsuspecting users can be exploited or embarrassed in some personal situations, if these features are not manually disabled.

The bottom line is that it is ultimately up to each individual user to make themselves aware of latest scams. To help you, we’ve found a great site that regularly publish latest scams on Facebook located at facecrooks.com.