I was the victim of a Facebook attack (and it could happen to you) - UPDATED

The night of Wednesday, April 30 was turning out to be a good night. I had just finished ended my Politics and the Internet class on a high note, with pizza, good discussion and free Google swag, and, after dropping some stuff off in my room, I was going out to celebrate a friend's birthday.

But when I got to my room, I found two of my roommates confused and wondering why I had posted particularly not work safe links on their Facebook walls. I logged on to my Facebook and found this on the walls of literally hundreds of my friends:

y0 dude, howdy ?? you wana see babes live on web cams ? i bet you want.. eheh ..
these chicks do whatever you say omg!!have a luk at [link to website removed]

I logged into my GMail account and saw that, within the previous hour and a half, I had received upwards of 30 wall posts from friends, wondering what was going on.

I had been the victim of a Facebook spamming.

Apparently, this isn't new - people have been reporting on Facebook spamming since at least last year, with other reports coming this year (there's also another scam using fake links to Facebook pages).

Based on my experience with this spam, here are some tips I have for anyone who finds themselves a victim:

1. Change your password IMMEDIATELY - according to Facebook, if this happens to you, you should "reset your password immediately. Ensure that you create a new password at least six characters long that contains numbers as well as a variety of characters and capitalization. Please also create a new password that is different than other passwords that you use on the internet." For that matter, you should change your password every couple of weeks or so for security's sake.

2. Don't click on the link and delete the wall post - duh and duh.

3. Contact Facebook - if you are a victim of spamming, or if one of your friends has "sent" you spam, send an e-mail to abuse@facebook.com explaining the situation. Supposedly they'll get back to you within 24 hours - I e-mailed them last night and am hoping to hear from them today.

4. Change your profile picture and/or status - I changed my profile picture to text that basically said I had been the victim of a Facebook virus/spam and that I was sorry for all the wall posts people got. I also did the same for my Facebook status. This isn't really required, but it was a lot easier than trying to respond to 40+ wall posts and messages.

5. Take it with a grain of salt/look at the bright side -so my friends got some spam wall posts from me. None of my friends think I'm a perverted porn pusher (for the most part). In fact, a lot of the wall posts I got were: a) really nice "I'm sorry you got spammed, lets hang out soon!" messages; or b) were from people I haven't talked to in years that I am now communicating with. As bad as it may be, maybe spam messages are the new way of bringing people together on the Internet (I certainly hope not). But in any case, I suggest those that receive these messages from unwilling/unknowing friends treat them with the same kindness.

Hopefully these tips and the information above are helpful. If Facebook sends along any important information (i.e why this happened to me, or anyone for that matter), I will update when I get it, but in the meantime, beware and be safe.

UPDATE: I spoke with a friend of mine who works at ResNet, and she said that the GW e-mail network (and possibly the GW Facebook network) is incredibly infested with spam and viruses, and that affected computers are coming into ResNet by the dozens. So be careful everyone!

How to Rid Your CMail Account of Spam

As some of you may have noticed, I'm not a huge fan of spam email.

Between five different email accounts, I commonly get 50+ messages a day. This means I don't have much time (or storage space in my meager CMail account) for business opportunities in Hong Kong, designer watches for less, or "get the best shape of your babymaker!".

That said, the CMail accounts that GW gives us don't come with the nifty community-based spam reporting and detecting system of Gmail.

Nevertheless, there is a completely unintuitive way to set up a spam filter, and I finally figured it out. Some of you may be lightyears ahead on this, but for the rest of us...

1. Click here. You will be taken to the GW Account Management Console in a new window or tab.


2. Log in using your email address (without the "@gwu.edu") and your normal password.

3. Click on "Anti-Spam options."


4. By default, spam is delivered to your INBOX. The first set of buttons allows you to change that. If you want to have all identified spam delivered to a separate "Spam" folder, select the option that says: File all spam mail to a folder named "Spam".

Additionally, this will prevent spam mail from being sent to any POP client, i.e. your Blackberry, Outlook/Apple Mail, or even Gmail (if you forward your CMail to a Gmail account).

5. If you deliver the mail to a "Spam" folder, you can choose to have that mail automatically deleted on a regular basis. The second set of buttons allows you to have mail deleted if it is older than 1, 7 or 14 days. First select the first option ("delete mail") and then select the appropriate time period from the drop-down menu.

I picked 1 day, since I'm "currently operating at 91% of your quota."

6. Hit the "Save Changes" to commit your changes, which should take effect immediately. You can switch settings whenever necessary to suit your preferences.

For more tips, click here to go to ISS's site.