If a friend posts something on your Facebook wall, how likely are you to click the link? Pretty likely, right?  You should realize that there are “bad” links out there.  Sometimes a post on your wall from a friend might actually be a virus, like, say, “Hey, [Insert name]! I got this totally chill deal on an iPad. It was free! Just click this link for the deets!”  If you click on rogue links, they’ll steal your information, and in turn, affect your college campus’s security.

These deceitful Facebook links—posted by hackers who have stolen student login information—have become a primary concern among campus technology leaders, and some colleges and universities are using security programs that isolate student computers before they do damage to the entire campus network.

Much like hackers have used suspicious eMail messages to solicit personal information from web users, spammers are now “clickjacking” Facebook accounts and posting links to friends’ Facebook pages. It appears to Facebook users that a friend has shared something with them—perhaps a contest to win a cruise or an Apple iPad. If they click the link, their information is stolen, and the process begins again…

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Hackers “want you to jump off of the Facebook server and jump onto another server, so it can take your [information],” said Frank Andrus, chief technology officer for Bradford Networks.

Facebook apps can be a source of malware on campus networks, but an application launched last fall claims to scan Facebook news feeds for infected links or posts.

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