spam

Facebook is reminding developers that a spammy app is an ignored app. The social network announced a change in its developer guidelines today to make sure the number of notifications app developers send to app users stay at a minimum.

The two new guidelines -- not sending notifications to inactive users and maintaining a 17 percent click-to-impression ratio -- go into effect on November 9.

This means apps can only send notifications to users who have visited their apps within 28 days and apps sending a lot of notifications need to make sure that users are clicking the notifications they … Read more

Twitter has added several new e-mail alert options, and these new settings are creating more e-mail traffic for you. Some of these notifications are useful, like an update about new followers or a direct message, while others are just an annoyance.

All of these new options are enabled by default and if you normally access Twitter from a mobile device, you may have missed the opportunity to disable them before the e-mail started coming. Thankfully, reducing the amount of unnecessary e-mail from Twitter is fairly simple through its Web interface.

To access Twitter's e-mail notifications, just log in to … Read more

Google launched a new tool today that allows Webmasters to eliminate links to their site that they believe might be hurting its search rankings.

Announced at the Pubcon conference in Las Vegas today, the "disavow links" tool is designed to help sites that have already been warned by Google of manual spam actions based on "unnatural links." The tool is recommended as a last-resort solution to link spam -- disreputable or irrelevant links that may hurt a site's search engine results ranking.

"By removing the bad links directly, you're helping to prevent Google (… Read more

India has surpassed the U.S. and taken the lead as the greatest spam-sending country in the world. One out of every six junk messages that litter users' e-mail inboxes are coming from India, according to a new report from SophosLabs.

The security vendor's third-quarter "Dirty Dozen" report of spam-relaying countries found that India upped its percentage of global spam for the third quarter in a row and now accounts for more than 16 percent of all junk e-mails.

What is important to note, however, is that this spam doesn't necessarily come directly from India's … Read more

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and that's especially true when it comes to spyware; wouldn't you rather protect your system than spend hours trying to rid it of malicious visitors? SpywareBlaster is a simple program that provides protection from ActiveX-based software and unwanted cookies for both Firefox and Internet Explorer users.

SpywareBlaster has a simple interface that will be easy for even novices to navigate. The main screen shows the protection status for Internet Explorer, restricted Web sites, and Firefox. By default, protection is disabled for each of these, but you can easily … Read more

The purge has commenced. Facebook is throwing out all fake users, accounts, and likes. That's right, all of those thousands of questionable thumbs ups are starting to disappear.

The social network announced last month that it'd start this massive deletion process, but it was unclear when. According to TechCrunch, Facebook confirmed today that the time is now.

Over the course of the day, tens of thousands of fans were quietly dropped from Facebook Pages. Data from Facebook metrics site PageData shows that Zynga's Texas HoldEm Poker lost 96,000 fans today, while Rihanna lost 22,198, and … Read more

A friend of mine recently sent me a direct message on Twitter, it said "lol u didnt se them taping u" and had a link to Facebook. I hadn't remembered being taped in the past few days and I'd never seen my friend use this type of Twitter-shorthand, along with typos. To me, it was obviously spam.

I'm not the only one to be getting these spammy direct messages on Twitter that lead to bogus Facebook links. Apparently a lot of people have been complaining of these messages, according to Sophos analyst Graham Cluley who … Read more

A surge in SMS phishing attacks this week took security experts by surprise and tricked victims into providing credit card and other sensitive information to scammers, a researcher said today.

The phishing onslaught, which targeted customers of the major cellular carriers in the U.S., started on Tuesday, said Mary Landesman, senior security researcher at security provider Cloudmark.

The number of SMS-based phishing attempts observed by security firm Cloudmark based on reports from consumers rose more than 900 percent during the first week of September from what would be expected over that period in a normal month, she said in … Read more

Are you getting spam that has a Facebook friend's name listed as sender but was actually sent from an unknown e-mail address? Me too.

These are vestiges of an attack that exploited a misconfiguration on Facebook that was fixed last week, according to Facebook. Though spammers aren't scraping any new friend information off Facebook accounts, they are apparently using previously obtained data to send spam. That means the messages could come until e-mail providers are able to find the source of the spam and shut the spammers down.

Here's the Facebook statement:

Recently, we discovered a single … Read more