Facebook Hacked: Porn and Gore Spam Attack Over?
It appears Facebook has addressed the porn and gore spam problem it had over the last couple of days with most traces of the objectionable material out of sight.
Yesterday was the worst attack on the sight's history with an estimated 50 percent of users being hacked, although this exact number cannot be confirmed.
Users all over the world were greeted by a news feed littered with pornography and gore infested snuff photos and videos depicting graphic scenes of death, nudity, child porn, and even porn involving Jesus.
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For many, these images could not be unseen, and several users stated the violent images were so bad they would have welcomed the porn over it.
The Christian Post asked Facebook users if they experienced any more problems today and most were in the clear.
Both Kerri Bosso and Robert Pimpsner reported nothing unusual on their feeds while news reporter Mark Stein told of what he saw this afternoon. "Saw the bloodied, cracked skull one recently. And the giant cyst on a man's neck. That's about all. Nothing since Sunday."
Courtney Zito, the actress who told CP of her horrors yesterday said, "Yesterday was the worst for me. I won't even go into detail, but the images were so disturbing, full of gore and lots of them were sacrilegious, so I just stayed off. Today I wanted to see if they worked it out so I came on and it seems like all the porn and gore is gone. But it's still early so who knows."
Another user, Jodi Palermo, saw her first bits of the hack this morning.
"It's starting with people clicking just pictures that they think their friends commented on, but it's all a hack, even if the picture is just of someone holding a baby,” she said. “And once you click on it, they use your account for posting disgusting pictures.
Palermo added, “I think it's just a bunch of jerks trying to ruin social networking for everyone. It just gets me angry because I work with youth and I don't want them to be exposed to this kind of garbage in the safety of their own homes."
Pimpsner, who provided CP and its readers good advice to keep their accounts safe had more to say today.
"Facebook faces about 600,000 hacker attacks a day and does a fairly good job of taking care of them. I am not surprised to see them clean this up quickly as they have an entire team dedicated to this," he said. "If you have experienced this hack then first run a virus scan then change your fb password and go through your app permissions and get rid of those you dont recognize."
Facebook has not released an official statement and a group has yet to come forward and take credit for the well-planned and destructive attack.
Some people are blaming the super hack group "Anonymous," after they made threats against the company in August because of the lack of privacy users have on it. The group set their eyes on Nov. 5 as the day they would "kill" Facebook, but the day came and went with no foreseeable action.
"Anonymous" released a public statement through their media sites stating the attack wasn't by them, but it is uncertain who represents Anonymous because of the many outlets of media they inhabit.
Tech junkie Alan Rogozin added to the conspiracy theory with a mindful observation.
"What I think is ironic is this is the perfect time for facebook to become unstable, as Google+ was recently released publicly and now with the release of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus next week, and Android 4.0, integrating Google+ into the Android OS making it incredibly convenient, and will probably work a hell of a lot better than Facebook for Android, this is the perfect time to really push for Google+ to overtake the Facebook audience," he said on his profile.
Whatever the case might be, Facebook was able to thwart most of the problems in around 24 hours. It is unlikely Facebook will become another Myspace, a barren wasteland of profiles covered in spam, but they received a wake up call of their privacy settings.
As Facebook recovers from the worst hack it ever experienced, the creators and its users can only speculate if something like this can happen again, or if it could possibly get any worse. There have been no reports of stolen information or cracked accounts as far as personal information goes. All the hacks required a picture or video virus.
Do you think the hacks are over? Are you still receiving spam? If this were to happen again would you leave Facebook? Sound off in the comments.
