WebProNews

Twitter Begins Rolling Out its Own Retweet Feature

Back in the summer time, Twitter announced that it intended to add a retweet option to its service and the API. Twitter is now rolling out the feature to a small percentage of Twitter users.

Facebook Awarded $711 Million In Spam Case

Spammers may want to steer clear of Facebook in the future.  Late yesterday, a representative of the social network's legal team announced that it was awarded $711 million in damages as a result of a case against Sanford "Spamford" Wallace.

Beware the Emails of Halloween

Symantec's MessageLabs released its Intelligence Report for the month of October, and it reveals the that the spammers behind the biggest botnets – Cutwail, Rustock and Donbot – are using the upcoming major holidays and world events as the themes for their the latest spam runs. This is not particularly surprising news, but it is news that people should be aware of nevertheless.

Twitter Fights Spam With New Reporting Option

Spam is something that can have a serious impact on Twitter: It annoys individual users, messes up lists of trending topics, and even makes the site look less suitable for businesses and monetization.  It's a good thing, then, that Twitter's going after spammers with a new spam reporting option.

Email Attacks Put Other Types of Accounts in Jeopardy

You've probably seen reports of big webmail phishing attacks over the week. A spokesperson for Symantec's Message Labs tells WebProNews, however, that most reports have glossed over a key point to consider. That is that the potential impact on other aspects of victims' online lives are in jeopardy as well.

Top 10 Most Spammed States in the US

Symantec's MessageLabs revealed a list of the most spammed states in the US today, with some somewhat surprising results. And the award for state that receives the most spam is...Idaho.

Phishing Down, But Probably Only Temporarily

Spam is rising as we get closer to the Christmas holiday season according to Symantec, although they do say that phishing is down. The company has shared some findings from its September State of Phishing report. According to the report, there was a 45% reduction in phishing attacks between July and August. Symantec says this will likely be a short-term lull, however, reflecting the end of a particular toolkit attack on social networking sites.

How Google Looks at Spam Complaints

Google's Matt Cutts answered a user question about how the company handles spam complaints in the most recent video upload to the Google Webmaster Central YouTube Channel. More specifically, the question was: Is there a minimum number of spam complaints about a domain and/or SERP before Google reviews the complaint? Presumably you get thousands of spam complaints daily, are these sorted into any order to be reviewed? The most popular first?

Digg Makes Changes to Nofollow Policy

Digg announced today that it has tweaked its policy on the nofollow attribute on external links.  "We've made a few changes to the way Digg links to external sites that may impact some folks in the SEO community," says Digg's John Quinn. "These changes reduce the incentive to post spammy content (or link spam) to Digg, while still flowing ’search engine juice’ freely to quality content."

Security Issues Holding Back Social Media's Potential

Social Media's rise in popularity has created some very real problems for the Internet and its users. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter have seemingly opened the floodgates to security troubles, and over the past few weeks, this has been accentuated by a number of issues and studies.