At Least 20% of Facebook Users Exposed to Malware in Their News Feeds

It’s been less than a month since BitDefender launched its Facebook app Safego, offering a scan to Facebook users of the links posted to their profile. As the emphasis of much malware shifts from email to social networks, the app offered a preventative method, of sorts, to help cut down on malware’s spread. Just how much malware is out there? Based on the scans that BitDefender has run so far, about one-fifth of Facebook users have some sort of infection in their news feeds.

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According to the app’s Facebook page, “Since its launch (almost a month ago), BitDefender safego scanned 17 million Facebook posts and it has detected infections on the news feeds of around 20% of its users. We detected several types of scam waves.”

CNET reports that “Over 60 percent of attacks come from notifications from malicious third-party applications on Facebook’s developer platform, the study found. Within that, the most popular subset of “attack apps” (21.5% of total kinds of malware) were those that claim to perform a function that Facebook normally prohibits, like seeing who has viewed your profile and who has “unfriended” you. 15.4% lure in users with bonus items for Facebook games like free items in FarmVille; 11.2% offer bonus (yet bogus) Facebook features like free backgrounds and “dislike buttons,” 7.1% promise new versions of well-known gaming titles like World of Warcraft; 5.4% claim to give away free cell phones; and 1.3% claim to offer a way to watch movies for free online.”

As this data was gleaned from those who took the time to install the BitDefender app – and who may therefore be predisposed to actually care about their security online – it’s likely that the statistics across all Facebook users is actually higher. In addition, the Safego app only analyzes links in news feeds. It doesn’t analyze malware distributed via personal messages, something that may become an increasing point of attack now that Facebook has expanded its messaging system.

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