There has been a lot of spam running around facebook lately and no one seems to know what to do when it happens, so let your favorite techie tell you.
First if you see what is obviously spam in your news feed: move your mouse over the post and you will see an X appear in the upper right hand corner. Click it. In the drop down you will see mark this post as spam. Click that. You will see a confirmation box pop up. Click confirm. This helps you by removing the post from your feed so you don’t click it and it helps facebook find the spam to kill it.
Second if the post is on your wall: go to your page (click your name in the upper right hand corner of the page) and follow the directions described in the first section. This will remove it from your wall and let facebook know there was spam.
Third if you are the one sending spam: I have seen many people talking about the http vs https, this is very good. Check to see if you have a secure connection to facebook especially if you are using public or unsecured (not password protected) wifi. It is a good idea to change your password at this point but may not be necessary if it is simply session hijacking (more on this later) or if you clicked a bad link (can happen to anybody).
Session hijacking: basically if you are on public wifi and you are using http and not https a hacker can see the info you are sending back and forth and virtually hop on. So they don’t know your password anymore than I do. This is why it may not be necessary but still a good idea to change your password. If any of your emails or other logins use the same password, change that password as well.
Now that you have the facebook end done what do you do? Well if you have a Windows PC there’s a fairly good chance you got a virus through all this. If you have anti-virus software open it up, click update, click full scan or scan whole computer or something similar and click scan. This will take hours but it very needed. If you don’t have anti-virus software then I recommend Microsoft Security Essentials. Download it, install it and run a full scan. If your computer won’t download it then try downloading it to a flash drive on another computer and installing that way. If you can’t figure it out and you know me, give me a call. If your anti-virus finds a virus don’t freak out. It happens to everyone, really. Just reboot and run the scan again till it returns 0 infections so that you know it has gotten them all.
Lastly preventative maintenance: Click account in the upper right corner of your facebook page and click Account Settings. Scroll down to Account Security. Make sure the https option is selected and that send me an email under Login Notifications is selected. This will let you know if anyone is logging into your account. Finally use discretion as to what links you click, what you like and what apps you give approval for on facebook. This will save you a headache and call to someone like me.