Wikipedia's affiliate marketing entry includes the following sentence: "Although many affiliate programs have terms of service that contain rules against spam, this marketing method has historically proven to attract abuse from spammers."

This is very true — affiliate marketing methods definitely attract abuse from spammers.

One of our Safe and Savvy bloggers, Melody-Jane, recently asked me about some "free" offers for F-Secure Internet Security 2010 that she spotted on YouTube. She thought the videos, and their associated links, looked just a bit more than suspicious. So I decided to check them out.

Today we have an example of yet another Facebook spam (YAFS).

This particular spam links to a Facebook Page called "I May NEVER T�XT AGAIN After Reading THI$!!".

As you can see, there are over 200 thousand likes.

The Facebook user must click the Like button in order to continue.

Facebook spam (erroneously called scams) has been making headlines recently…

And with all the attention on "virally spreading" links, we wondered, just how effective is it? What's the conversion rate? Links spread virally — but so what? That's only one step in the process. How many people actually fill out the CPA surveys that make the money?

Here's one recent example of spam attempting to use English football player Peter Crouch as bait.

Facebook's "People You May Know" feature appears to be using profile search history when making its recommendations.

I frequently search for spam related keywords, and today, two spam accounts were recommended to me.

Elma and Drema? I don't know anybody by those names…

Searching for the name "Elma Fewell" yielded a few doppelgängers. Checking incremental Facebook IDs yielded even more.

Q: What is this all about?
A: It's about a site called jailbreakme.com that enables you to Jailbreak your iPhones and iPads just by visiting the site.

Q: So what's the problem?
A: The problem is that the site uses a zero-day vulnerability to execute code on the device.

Q: How does the vulnerability work?

Roger Thompson of AVG, wrote an interesting post today about a scam involving a Facebook Page which asks folks to copy and paste JavaScript into the browser's address bar. Part of the JavaScript's function appeared to automate the "liking" of the page, causing it to spread. Sounds like an unlikely trick, right?

And so how many people fell for this? According to Thompson, the page had nearly 600 thousand likes.

Unbelievable.

The folks in PR have come up with a competition to promote our Anti-Theft for Mobile software.

We're giving away 15 phones — 12 Nokia 5230 and 3 Nokia X6 — starting on June 15th.

You'll find the details here: http://www.f-secure.com/phonehunt

Happy hunting!

There's yet another Facebook spam application on the run.

It uses this string of text to lure folks: "I am shocked!!! The teacher nearly killed this boy: http://bit.ly/aWeBMl - Worldwide scandal!"

If you click on the link, you're directed to this application:

How many have clicked on the link so far?

There's been a great deal of discussion (controversy?) recently regarding personal privacy and the pursuit of profit. Many pundits are concerned that businesses are putting personal data at risk for financial gains.

And so the question is being asked: Are Facebook and Google contributing to an erosion of personal privacy?

So let's take a look at that, shall we? If you want to find personal information about somebody, are you really dependent on Google? Or Facebook? Really? No… not really.