Tuesday, January 25, 2011

How social scams and spam spread

 In my past posts I have discussed on what type of social spam and scams are going around but in this post I want to discuss how they are spread. They spread around a few different ways which I will cover in this post.

 The first way they spread is through status updates. This is by my research the most common way I have seen them spread. The bad social app updates the status with the common scam update and spreads it out to all the users friends. This is mainly how I see PageSpy or MyFirstStatus like apps spreading.

 The next way these apps spread is by posting on friends walls. The bad app will not make any changes to the users status to make it less noticeable but will spread the spam around to friends walls. The "Oh my see what this person posted to get expelled from school" or "Wow this news story amazed me" like spam apps normally go through this route in my research. This makes the bad app less noticeable by the account owner.

 The first of the two less common ways is through social inbox. Sending the bad app link directly to a user is not commonly from what I can tell currently (I am going by reports) but a few cases have been reported with the bad app sending direct messages.

 The final of the less common two is one of the newer ways that are being used. Some bad social apps, scams, and spam are sending users social instant messages to the users with just the temptation to click a link. The use of sending malware through an instant message is not new by newer variants of IM worms are now using the IM system of social networking sites. These attacks are not very common at the moment but are growing.

 So always watch what you click on social media sites.



  

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