As per security experts, social networking sites have emerged as the latest front in the war against spam.

An anti-spam enterprise, Cloudmark, said that in the 6 months leading till March 2008, social networking Websites experienced a tremendous increase in the number of spam on their networks. Cloudmark also claimed that, at many leading social networking sites, almost 30% of new accounts designed are fake accounts or zombie accounts created for deceiving the users and for other harmful purposes.

Vice President of Marketing at Cloudmark, JF Sullivan, informed that the spam advertised by social networking sites is similar to spam advertised through mail and are visited by the same kind of people, as per the news by TheRegister on May 14, 2008.

Sullivan also added that there is a kind of inherent faith in social networking Websites and people do not expect they are going to face spam.

The security researchers also said that junk messages appeared to have come from an acquaintance or a friend and can be acted on by users on social networking sites as against the similar messages received by mail. The spammers targeting social networking sites made friends by inserting profile, which shows pictures of beautiful attractive women. By making people part of their profile or network it become simple for spammers to send them spam.

Sullivan also said that all the leading social networking sites have some trouble with spam, receiving spam from 15 to 30%. ThreatLab Manager at Clearswift, Pete Simpson, said that the social networking sites have a huge appeal for spammers as they can attack a wide range of users, as per the news of TheRegister on May 14, 2008.

Also, the research by Cloudmark says that social networking users being an easy target to spam, proves correct with the recent $230 Million anti-spam judgment given in favor of MySpace with 2 harmful spammers are punished for implementing a phishing scam made for stealing the login details of MySpace users before attacking users with fake messages and harmful sites. Almost 730,000 fraudulent messages, which appeared to have come from a known source, were sent to MySpace number.

Simpson dwells on the idea that making users aware about spam is more important than just executing a technology solution to the problem.