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, says ReadWriteWeb. 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.”