For the past week, Facebook has been facing a viral spam attack which affected Facebook users.

The spam attack which was supposedly done by the "hackitivist" group called Anonymous would entice users to click on links that would supposedly give you information about people who viewed your profile or an interesting story that would make you laugh. Once users clicked the link, they would be redirected in a website which would install malicious software. This, in turn would show graphic or violent images in their wall which would also be visible in the news feed section of Facebook.

Facebook reasoned out "browser vulnerability" as the main reason on why these attacks were able to penetrate the social networking site. The company also mentioned that they have already taken actions in order to fix the spam attack. Facebook assured users that the company is strengthening their system in order to prevent this kind of attack from happening again.

Despite these measures, the company is also pushing their users to also take action towards these attacks by being proactive. One way that users could prevent themselves from being victims is through not clicking on suspicious links like getting free products (gadgets, coffee, etc.). Most of the time, the information written in these links are false and this could just be a way for hackers to access your personal information in Facebook. If your friends posted these links on their wall, verify if they were really the ones who sent the link because they might also be victims of this attack. Another way that users could protect themselves is through visiting the website directly and search for the topic that they are interested in instead of clicking on the suspicious links provided. Users could also opt to further enhance their Facebook security features by enabling "https" browsing in their Facebook settings. Through doing this, users could limit their access to suspicious contents. In order to change these settings, go to Account settings, choose security section and then check on the "Secure Browsing" option.

This is not the first time Facebook has encountered this kind of attack. Back in August, the Justice Department announced that they had indicated Sanford Wallace who is also known as the Facebook "spam king" for accessing more than 500,000 Facebook accounts and sending more than US$27 million spam messages. He was ordered to pay $711 million for committing this crime.