Ever since the Internet has grown leaps and bounds, the emergence of spam has always been its main problem. Now that social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter are expanding as well, these social networking sites are also the latest victims of a new type of spam which is called "social spam".

Impermium, an anti-spam software revealed that at least 40% of the accounts in Facebook and Twitter are considered as spam. Mark Risher, the chief executive of the company stated that this type of spam is much effective as compared to the old-fashioned way of e-mail spam. He was quoted stating

"'Social spam can be a lot more effective than e-mail spam. The bad guys are taking to this with great abandon.'" He also mentioned that about 8% of the messages sent through these social networking sites are spam and this percentage is increasing as time goes by. Most of the time, spammers are using these social networking sites to 'like' or 'share' a certain page which allows access to their personal profile."

Twitter and Facebook have already implemented additional security features in order to prevent "social spam" from spreading in the network. Both companies have hire security programmers to deal with this issue in order to alleviate these types of attack. Frederic Wolens, the spokesman for Facebook affirmed this move by Facebook saying "Tens of millions of dollars are spent on our site-integrity systems, including hundreds of full-time employees."

Aside from these security features, Twitter and Facebook are also encouraging their users to also be careful when accessing their account in order not to be victims of social spam. It would be beneficial if people would be vigilant and aware of any feature that is too good to be true (e.g. free products or prizes just by clicking) because there is a high percentage of these apps being spam.