BitDefender, an award winning provider of innovative internet security solutions, has released statistics derived from its social networking safety app safego launched in beta at the end of last month. The application, which has scanned over 17 million Facebook posts to date, detected infections on the news feeds of around 20% of its users.

Key Statistics

• To date, safego has over 14,000 users and scanned over 17 million Facebook posts
• Infected items have been detected on the news feeds of around 20% of safego users
• Over 60% of attacks come from notifications from malicious third-party applications on Facebook’s developer platform

Third-party application threats

• 21.5% – Applications claiming to provide functionality that Facebook does not offer such as seeing who has viewed your profile and who has removed you as a friend
• 15.4% – Applications that entice users with the promise of bonus items for Facebook games such as free items in FarmVille, MafiaWars or FishVille
• 11.2% – Applications that falsely claim to offer bonus features such as free backgrounds and “dislike buttons”.
• 7.1% – Applications that pretend to be Facebook versions of popular gaming titles such as Super Mario, The Sims or World of Warcraft
• 5.4% – Applications that attract users by claiming to give away free mobile phones
• 1.3% – Applications that supposedly offer a way to watch movies for free online.

Non application related threats

• 16.3% of worms viewed on Facebook did so through enticing users to watch some kind of shocking video such as ‘the king of pop is still alive’
• 4.6% of attacks can be connected to viruses like Koobface, where a user’s account can be hijacked and malware automatically posted on the walls of a user’s friends
• The rest of the 17.2% is formed by more eccentric threats (which do not have a high spread rate)

safego was launched on Facebook in Beta stage on the 26th October 2010. Through a simple interface, the safego application checks the user’s privacy levels and identifies personal information that is visible to strangers. It also scans the user’s wall, message inbox and comments for malicious links and shared content that could be compromised such as videos and pictures.