Unfortunately, it’s pretty easy for hackers, especially through the use of a Facebook app, to hack your profile or page and post things that further infect others. You’ve probably seen it happen before or even had it happen to yours own account. You hop on Facebook and a friend has posted something sketchy or you notice something out of the ordinary on your own profile.
While it’s easy to say, “just use common sense”, the situation isn’t always so cut and dry. New results have been published by University of California researchers after they ran a four month long study on an app by the name of MyPageKeeper. That app helps keep hackers from getting unauthorized access to a page and doing whatever they please with it.
Over the four month period which took place from June to October of last year, they sorted through a whopping 40 Million posts from 12,000 people who had installed the app. Quite shockingly, nearly half, 49%, were exposed to social malware in some fashion.
Another interesting find from the study was that only 54% of hijackers used a URL shortener to disguise their illegitimate links. That sounds like a “don’t click here” warning but apparently for many users it still led to clicks. All in all, it took MyPageKeeper an average of just .0046 seconds to find posts, mark them either as safe or unsafe, and alert the user/users if something was off.
Best of all, it prevented 97% of hijacking attempts which is above the board for the industry as a whole.
The Facebook app is currently free and you can learn more about it here.
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