by DAN CALLOWAY
Published 01 January 2010 @ 00:13 UCT

From: Brad Stone:  New York Times

NEW YORK, NEW YORK - Facebook scam artists have closed out 2009 by snagging a prominent victim: Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.

On Friday morning at around 10:30 a.m., Mr. Genachowski sent his Facebook friends this puzzling message: “Adam got me started making money with this.” It was followed by a link to a Web page that is no longer active. The message blitz indicated that Mr. Genachowski’s account had been taken over by a malicious program that was using it to send out spam.

As of Friday afternoon Mr. Genachowski’s Facebook profile was no longer visible on the site. A Facebook spokesman, Larry Yu, said the company learned of the problem this morning and suspended the account, as it routinely does in such cases. An F.C.C. spokeswoman declined to comment.

The chairman is by no means alone in getting inadvertently embroiled in social networking scams that can be embarrassing. I wrote about such scams earlier this month, noting that the humiliation sown by these attacks is usually just a byproduct of spammer efforts to get people to click on various links.

It’s not clear how Mr. Genachowski’s Facebook account was compromised; perhaps he or a family member clicked on a malicious link, allowing his account to be taken over.

The most important question: Who the heck is Adam?

Update: Facebook sent this statement, which indicates that if Mr. Genachowski wants to continue to use Facebook, he will have to get some education about the safe use of this particular form of communication.

We take security very seriously and have devoted significant resources towards helping our users protect their accounts.  We’ve developed complex automated systems that detect and flag Facebook accounts that are likely to be compromised (based on anomalous activity like lots of messages sent in a short period of time, or messages with links that are known to be bad).  Because Facebook is a closed system, we have a tremendous advantage over email.  That is, once we detect a phony message, we can delete that message in all inboxes across the site.

We also block malicious links from being shared and work with third parties to get phishing and malware sites added to browser blacklists or taken down completely.  Users whose accounts have been compromised are put through a remediation process, where they must take steps to re-secure their account and learn security best practices.  This is what happened with Chairman Genachowski’s account.

To combat these threats, however, we need users’ help too.  You can protect yourself by never clicking on strange links, even if they’ve been sent by friends, and by being wary of sites that ask you to download or upgrade software.

We educate people about online security through our Facebook Security Page, which has well over one million fans.