Facebook says it's winning against Justin Bieber smut onslaught

Facebook said it is well on the way to cleaning up a noxious slurry of porn and pictures of dead animals left by a spam campaign that targeted users' walls this week. The attack - which resulted in punters being greeted by an avalanche of photoshopped pornographic images of Justin Bieber - involved tricking users into pasting …

[Dave Murray]

What kind of a moron can be tricked into pasting code into their address bar? I'd have thought most people stupid enough to do something like that haven't heard of cut + paste and would probably be scared by that complicated code stuff.

And how the hell does a dodgy shopping site make money from people being tricked into posting fake celeb porn on Facebook?

Whole thing smells fishy to me.

[Old Handle]

I thought that at first, but actually it's not so strange. It's fairly common to see someone post something and say "You may have to copy and paste this link". Normally this is done to defeat anti-hotlinking measures. But obviously the average Facebook user isn't going to know the difference between an normal link and a piece of JS code. But it's not realistic to think most people can't copy and paste. This isn't 1999. Admittedly some of them probably thought they were real clever for being able to do do it.

As for your last point, I have not freaking idea. That doesn't make very much sense to me either. It's also worth noting that in the US, those pictures are legally considered child pornography, even though they are fake, because they ostensibly show an identifiable minor.

[Oliver Mayes]

There are several fake pages on Facebook that claim to only allow you to view their content if you spam, um, I mean recommend the page to at least 10 of your friends. They also provide a handy javascript snippet that you can paste into your address bar. The script opens the share link on the page, ticks all of your friends that pop up and submits it. So stupid people have been conditioned for a while to run any scripts that a page tells them to in order to get access to 'premium' content.

[Anonymous Coward]

> We have also been putting those affected through educational checkpoints

I assume this is a euphemism involving a length of 2x4?

[Anonymous Coward]

Alternately, people could just stop using Facebook.

*thumbs up*

[Peter Storm]

pornographic images of Justin Bieber!

Pass the mind bleach.

[Anonymous Coward]

i think posting Bierber-pr0n to facebook is hilarious. Where can I get this worm?

[Anonymous Coward]

>"Where can I get this worm?"

Want a copy? Just cut and paste the following into your URL bar: "javascript:alert("i am a plonker");"

[Error Message]

What about Facebooks own smut?

You know, the paid advertising?

[Anonymous Coward]

... I read ...

"Facebook winning against Justin Bieber onslaught"

I didn't see the smut word at first and had high hopes that bieber was being punished in some way by farcebook. This would be no bad thing, we have to start *somewhere* with justin, he's a crime against humanity, he should be tried in the Hague for cultivating and encouraging a world of morons with poor taste.

I also think it's time for an internet "drivers license". You can't go online unless you pass a few fundamental tests. It starts with a big throbbing red animated gif which says "press me for free bieber music and pictures of kittens and ponies" - if you press it, you fail and have to live as a hermit in the woods with cardboard cutout bieber figures for company. You'll also get regular visits from zuckerbuerg. He will jump out randomly from behind trees wearing an inexplicable series of ill-fitting hats and will then lecture you on social media and why he thinks your a dumb schmuck for using facebook.

Paris, because she's a little smut.

[Mike Flugennock]

License'n'registration please... y'know you have a tail light out?

"I also think it's time for an internet 'drivers license'..."

Y'know, that idea's kinda funny and entertaining every time we read here about large numbers of 'Net users being revealed as idiots by the latest phish or other social engineering skankiness, but, seriously...? M'eh, I dunno. I keep flashing back about fifteen years, when some batshit New Jersey state assemblyman (as I recall) proposed the licensing of programmers.

[LegalAlien]

Ha ha ha ha!

Hilarious, new keyboard needed - or a cloth

[Graham Marsden]

Fortunately...

... I've not been exposed this horrendous and terrible onslaught which has affected so many people...

The photoshopped porn?

No, Justin Bieber!

[Alex-L]

Don't normally post in the comments but pasting JS code has been used by Facebookers to bypass pages which require you to like a page to see the content on it.

[Anonymous Coward]

>"pasting JS code has been used by Facebookers to bypass pages which require you to like"

Sucker. Those javascript links that let you see pages that you can only see by liking a page, *work* by doing the equivalent of liking the page for you.

[Mike Flugennock]

heyyyyy.... waitaminnit...

Y'mean, people were actually _tricked_ into PASTING JAVASCRIPT INTO THEIR BROWSERS?

Jeezus. We're fucking DOOMED, man.

Nuclear detonation icon, because my brain just exploded.

[Mike Flugennock]

Hey, hang on a second...

...y'mean, those Justin Bieber porn fotos were FAKE?

D'ahh, crap.

[FozzyBear]

What a wonderful insight

into the collective intelligence of the Facebook community, or at least, the large portion that was duped by this.

I must admit though I may have used the link myself simply to satisfy my belief that Justin beiber is in fact a Thai Ladyboy

[Richard Pennington 1]

When I learned security ...

... one of the things to do was to sanitise user input. So no Javascript in the URL bar.

Security 101, really.

[Old Handle]

I don't think that totally applies in this situation.The user is intended to have full control over a web browser. You could make a case that almost no one directly pastes JS code into the address bar, and so allowing that does more harm than good. But where do you draw the line? The same code can also be saved in a bookmark (thus creating a "bookmarklet"), which is a legitimate feature used by many users (myself included).

[zen1]

but they failed

on combatting Justin Bieber as a person.

[Winkypop]

Fail-O-Rama

aaahhahaaahhaaaaahaaaaaa!

...involved tricking users into pasting rogue JavaScript code into their browsers....

ahhhahaaaaahhhhhhaaaa...

[The Fuzzy Wotnot]

Yeah laugh it up Smug-Boy!

You're obviously not one of the poor saps who has to clean up any mess from this type of shit and then re-educate users, via wood to skull, that copy'n'paste is not always the wonder feature they think it is!

[Mike48US]

Revenge

I thought I heard someplace that beiber was Canada's revenge on the US for Miley Cyrus

[Tree]

Facebutt

your face, my butt

[Lamont Cranston]

If you need to be over 13 to use facebook,

surely no one using facebook will know who Justin Beiber is?