Abstract

Facebook faces many forms of abuse from a variety of actors primarily focused on making money off Facebook’s users. At best, these adversarial actors use questionable means. Facebook’s Site Integrity teams combat these abuses in order to protect our users and ensure their trust. Most abuse on Facebook’s goal is to get users to visit a URL offsite where a viral and/or monetization component is located. Facebook’s adversaries exploit our users’ trust in their friends through a variety of techniques including but not limited to phishing, MITM attacks, malware, fake and imposter accounts, as well as platform applications in order to get a user to visit a link.

This talk will focus on an overview of these attacks and some of Facebook’s countermeasures against them. The talk will then explore a trend towards browser malware that Facebook has seen gain traction since December 2011.

Christopher Palow leads an engineering team at Facebook’s London office focused on spam prevention and promoting user trust. Over the past five years Chris has focused on stopping abuse on Facebook from phishing, fake accounts, malware, and various other scams through innovative detection and response systems. Prior to joining Facebook Chris spent four years split among MITRE and Crossbeam Systems working on Linux Kernel issues specifically in the networking stack. Chris graduated with a BS & MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.