Facebook news feeds are beset with malware

ROMANIAN INSECURITY OUTFIT Bitdefender claims that one in five news feeds on Facebook contains some sort of malware.

The outfit looked at 14,000 user profiles and worked out that the bulk of the infectious software on the ego-stroking and privacy shredding website was written by independent developers.

Anything that uses the phrase "Free trial! Click here!" is likely to lead to a malware infection.

Facebook told the BBC that it is taking steps to cut down on malware. "Once we detect a phony message, we delete all instances of that message across the site," the website said.

Last month an old bit of malware called Koobface resurfaced on Facebook. It was first seen two years ago in the Internet world but the new strain works well on the social notworking website.

The messages usually have clickable topic lines like "Is this you in the video?" but when users actually click on the message, their web browser is hijacked to a third party website. We are amazed that anyone falls for them. µ