Trends in social website abuse

There's an interesting article here about the trends in abuse of social websites: http://blog.impermium.com/2011/08/31/de ... m-attacks/

Part of the article posted below. Follow the link for the full article:

Debut Impermium Index Reveals Surprising Trends in Social Web Spam Attacks
Aug 31, 2011

We’ve long speculated that social web spam and abuse carry greater consequences for users and site owners than simply being a nuisance. In fact, they pose significant reputation risk and cost to nearly all Internet businesses.

Today we unveiled the Impermium Index — the first, comprehensive set of data and analysis on the types and severity of social web spam and abuse. It shows that not only are social web attacks growing exponentially in number, but there is an increasing sophistication to the tactics used by spammers; we also reveal that your user growth stats may not be as accurate as you thought.

Our first report — Summer 2011 edition — is below. It’s based on a large representative sample of the social web — more than 104 million social media transactions collected over a 100 day period (June – August), from a base of more than 90 million users spread across 72 countries. Transactions analyzed in our first Impermium Index report included user generated content (UGC) posted on social networks, blogs, social bookmarking sites, and many other places around the Web.

Update, content moved here:

http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/31/impermium-launches-social-spam-index-finds-that-up-to-40-percent-of-online-ids-are-fake/

Run down the members list here and see the spam profiles and spam sleepers. They are easy to spot and a lot have advertising signatures. However that is about spam and you can add the same percentage again for scams. I think that 80% fake is more real but my own view from experience says it is up to 86%. It is not good news for Facebook shareholders. I haven't plucked figures from the sky and we dealt with cleaning looker.com out of scammers which gives a base line. I always tend to be careful with what most people call statistics, which is a complicated subject that can be abused, and involves serious number crunching. Incidently I gather this site knows about the spam profiles but lacks the admin staff to deal with it at the moment. I could say a lot more but......................