Barracuda Labs revealed some results from a study about Facebook profiles and how attackers use fake friends to blend into Facebook. Some noteworthy findings include:
- Almost 60 percent of fake accounts claim to be bisexual, 10 times more than real users
- Fake accounts have six times more friends than real users, 726 versus 130
- Fake accounts use photo tags over 100 times more than real users, 136 tags per four photos versus one tag per four photos
- Fake accounts almost always (97 percent) claim to be female, as opposed to 40 percent for real users
Barracuda Labs also shares the following infographic:
“Likes, News Feeds and Apps have helped lead Facebook to its social network dominance and now attackers are harnessing those same features to efficiently scale their efforts,” said Dr. Paul Judge, chief research officer at Barracuda Networks. “These fake profiles and apps give attackers a long-lived path to continuously present malicious links to innocent users.
“Also, researchers have shown how friending malicious accounts can lead to account takeover using Facebook’s trusted friend account recovery,” he added. “We have analyzed thousands of fake accounts to determine features and patterns that distinguish them from real users, and created a feature-based heuristic engine to distinguish real users from fake profiles.”
