My Facebook News Feed has recently been filled with fake wall posts that are supposedly posted by my friends. It began to remind me of MSN Messenger, where you’d often get messages like “Heyyy! This site is so jokez check it out”. Fortunately, you often know that your friends would never put extra “y’s” in their “hey” or spell jokes with a “z”. Still, some people fell for these phishing scams on MSN Messenger and still fall for them on Facebook.

Some of these wall posts should be suspicious enough to make you think twice about visit an attached link. when I saw the above post in my New Feed, I immediately noticed some things that made it very clear to me that it wasn’t posted by my friend:

• It was posted at 3:53am, that’s an unusual time for anyone to be posting on Facebook
• My friend doesn’t use words like “heck” or spell “hey” with two y’s or capitalize ”what” after a coma
• the link is an application…this doesn’t make sense in the context of what’s written in the post…why would the video be inside an application?
• The two friends don’t usually communicate on Facebook – so it’s a bit unusual that they would share content

Little things like this should signal to you that perhaps the post on your wall is not actually composed by your friend, but may be a result of a phishing scam.

There have also been the regular shocking sort of posts that you may have seen your friends “like”, they pry on people’s curiosity to extract personal information. One such scam that you may have seen is the “Girl killed herself after her dad posed this to her wall” one, which asks you to like the page before you can actually see the supposed horrific post. When you “like” the page, your friends will be notified of your liking the application, spreading the scam further. Your information may also become released to third party applications.

Luckily, there are several resources out there that can help you keep your Facebook safe, which is becoming increasingly important–as many online properties are interconnected with Facebook. If you are an administrator of any Page, having your account information hacked can also be detrimental to keeping those properties secure and spam free.

Nancy Messieh has recently composed an excellent article outlining three tools which can help you keep your Facebook account safe. Here is a brief description of them:

Naked Secturity

Naked Security has been voted the number one IT security blog of the year. It includes information on security pertaining to social networks, spam, malware, and data loss. As well as news about the latest worms and hacking endeavors–including updates on the current pro-Wikileaks hackers. Facebook related security updates are posted on a near daily basis.

BitDefender SafeGo

SafeGo is a free Facebook application which automatically scans your profile for suspicious links and ensures that your private information is not available to those who are not your friends.

Facebook Security Page

This Page gives you updates on the latest Facebook security information. It posts the latest news right into your News Feed, so you stay well informed and ahead of the latest phishing scams.