Facebook awarded over $360 million damages against spammer

Facebook’s security team have reason to celebrate as they have claimed another scalp in the ongoing fight against spammers on the social network.

A post on Facebook’s Security page announced that this week a federal court has awarded the firm a whopping $360,500,000 in statutory damages and issued a permanent injunction against spammer Philip Porembski.

US district court judge Jeremy Fogel made the judgement against Porembski, who ran a firm called PP Web Services. Porembski was alleged to have obtained the login details of at least 116,000 Facebook users, and sent more than 7.2 million spam messages to victims’ online friends.

Some of the spam messages directed users to phishing websites that stole usernames and passwords, while others made money for Porembski every time someone clicked on the links.

A computer discovered by the Sacramento County Sherrif’s Department, which was…

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the anti-virus industry having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent security analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of computer security, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter at @gcluley, on Mastodon at @[email protected], or drop him an email.