A "coordinated spam attack" hits Facebook and the worst web passwords revealed.

Last week Facebook experienced what the company is calling a "coordinated spam attack" which resulted in pornographic and violent images appearing on the timelines of many users. This was happening for a few days and horrified users around the world complained of the disturbing images on social networking sights like Twitter and Facebook.

Facebook issued a statement saying that "Protecting the people who use Facebook from spam and malicious content is a top priority for us, and we are always working to improve our systems to isolate and remove material that violates our terms. Recently, we experienced a coordinated spam attack that exploited a browser vulnerability. Our efforts have drastically limited the damage caused by this attack, and we are now in the process of investigating to identify those responsible.

During this spam attack users were tricked into pasting and executing malicious javascript in their browser URL bar causing them to unknowingly share this offensive content. Our engineers have been working diligently on this self-XSS vulnerability in the browser. We’ve built enforcement mechanisms to quickly shut down the malicious Pages and accounts that attempt to exploit it. We have also been putting those affected through educational checkpoints so they know how to protect themselves. We’ve put in place backend measures to reduce the rate of these attacks and will continue to iterate on our defenses to find new ways to protect people."

I spoke to Mikko Hypponen the Chief Research Officer at F-Secure about these attacks and security in general.

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'Password' has topped a list of the 25 worst web passwords people commonly use to login into sites, leaving them more vulnerable to hackers. The second most common password is ‘123456’, another easy code for hackers to guess when trying to access people’s email or Facebook accounts. Other passwords to make the list, generated by SplashData, an American password management data application, include: ‘abc123’, ‘iloveyou’ and ‘monkey’. The full list can be seen below. Last month Facebook admitted that hackers are breaking into hundreds of thousands of Facebook accounts every day. Out of more than a billion logins to the website every 24 hours, 600,000 are impostors attempting to access users’ messages, photos and other personal information Facebook said. The figure is the first time that the social network has revealed how it is bombarded by hackers on a daily basis.

The 10 ‘worst’ internet passwords:

1. password
2. 123456
3. 12345678
4. qwerty
5. abc123
6. monkey
7. 1234567
8. letmein
9. trustno1
10. dragon

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Call of Duty®: Modern Warfare® 3 has become the biggest entertainment launch ever with an estimated sell-through of more than $400 million and more than 6.5 million units in North America and the United Kingdom alone in the first 24 hours of its release. The launch of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is the biggest entertainment launch of all time in any medium, there has never been another entertainment franchise that has set opening day records three years in a row. Sales for the Call of Duty franchise exceed worldwide theatrical box office for "Star Wars" and "Lord of the Rings," two of the most successful entertainment franchises of all time."

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Gaming and in particular online gaming is massive in South Africa. Last week, Telkom Do Gaming announced prize money of over R150 000 for gamers playing Battlefield 3 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. I spoke to Steve Whitford, Do Gaming’s editor about the competitions.

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I had the privilege of meeting one of my childhood hero’s this morning. Gary Kasparov is in South Africa for the educational project, Moves for Life. I managed to chat to him about his upcoming book due to be released in February 2012 called the “The Blueprint: Reviving Innovation, Rediscovering Risk, and Rescuing the Free Market” which has been co written by Kasparov, former co-founders of PayPal, Max Levchin and Peter Thiel who was also the CEO at PayPal and an investor in Facebook. This book sounds fascinating and they basically explore innovation, asking question where has the world s innovation gone?

Samsung have launched the GALAXY Note that is a unique category fitting in between a tablet and traditional cell phone. The 5.3” display HD Super AMOLED display also comes with advanced pen-input technology, called the S Pen, is combined with the GALAXY Note’s full touch screen to introduce a new type of user-experience. Through this, consumers are able to freely capture and create ideas while on the go. The GALAXY Note features S Memo, a multimedia application designed to record all forms of user-created content. Pictures, voice recordings, typed text, handwritten notes or drawings can all be captured via a single application and converted to a ‘memo’, to be edited, annotated and shared as desired. A one-step screen-capture function also allows users to instantly capture any screen; captured images can also be freely and accurately annotated using the S Pen before being filed or shared.

The device has a 1.4GHz dual-core processor ensures the device is incredibly fast and a smooth user interface ensures seamless usability. Lightning fast network speeds are enabled through the HSPA+, Wi-Fi 802.11n and Wi-Fi Direct connection, ensuring a quick and seamless browsing experience. This means that users can stream videos in real-time or engage with their friends through online gaming platforms.

The Samsung GALAXY Note will be available locally in 16GB at a recommended retail price between R8, 499.00 – R8, 999.00.

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Searching for a job online or even a car can become a pretty laborious process, because you need to search a number of different websites for the same thing. Local search portal Ananzi has introduced a unique feature as part of their search engine.

If you go to their site you can now specify your search based on area and search from within over 72 sites in South Africa bringing all the search results on one page.

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Nokia last week announced their first two Windows Phone 7 smartphones at the Nokia World conference in London. The smartphones are the first since the partnership with Microsoft was announced in February of this year. Nokia CEO Steven Elop launched the Lumia 800 and the Lumia 710 as well as a range of other handsets running the Symbian S40 platform.The new Nokia smartphones have so far been well received and many have commented on the stylish design and quality of the devices. They will be launched in Europe in November and in South Africa in the early part of 2012.

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An interesting study was released last week highlighting some interesting South African trends in social media. The research conducted by World Wide Worx shows that there are 4.2 million users registered with Facebook, 1.1 million on Twitter and around 10 million on MXit. Arthur Goldstuck the MD of World Wide Worx says that although these numbers are up on 2010, many users are not active on these social networking platforms.

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Hard disk prices have doubled for some PC manufacturers following the floods in Thailand. Floods hit the tech manufacturing hub last week, shutting down factories that make hard disks and other tech components. Over the past few weeks, a 500GB drive jumped in price from around $40 to $105, a 1TB has leapt from $60 to $130, and Ahmed has seen prices top $160. He said 2TB hard drives were $80 to $100 before the floods, and are now between $200 and $220.

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Nokia will face a crucial test this week when they introduce their first smartphones with Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 operating system. The N800 smartphone will be the first Nokia running Windows Phone 7 with the latest Mango update and is expected to be announced on Wednesday at Nokia World.

Nokia have been losing global market share over the last few years. In the last quarter their global cell phone market share fell to 24.5 % in September to 30.7 % share in December last year. But Nokia seem to have turned a corner, leaving the worst behind them. Last week I had lunch with Gerard Brandjes, Nokia General Manager for East and Southern Africa who told me that Nokia will continue to focus strongly on the South African market with a range of cell phones to maintain their cell phone market share in South Africa which is till the biggest.

Nokia handsets still have a fantastic build quality and with a great app store featuring over 300 000 apps, 800 of which are local apps, fantastic maps and a great music store, Nokia are reinventing themselves.

Their latest smartphone illustrates this comeback. The Nokia N9 is a superb phone, and tech website Engadet describes it as “the most beautiful phone ever made”. It certainly is one of the best smartphones I have ever used. The styling is elegant and the build quality is probably the best in the market. The 3.9” capacitive touch screen has a resolution of (854 x 480 pixels), a AMOLED display with scratch-resistant Corning® Gorilla® Glass. It has plenty of power under the bonnet, featuring a 1GHz Cortex A8 processor with superb graphics. Apart from the beautiful design the camera is what sets this device apart. It has a 8 MP camera with Carl Zeiss optics, autofocus, dual LED flash and records HD quality video in 720p resolution at 30 fps. The battery life is pretty good considering the screen size the phone weighs just 135 grams. The device is available as a 16GB which costs R5999 or a 64 GB version. It uses the Meego platform, which was Nokia last stab at Apple and Google’s dominance in the smartphone market. Nokia have said that they will not bring out any more phones using this platform.

There are two great tech conferences taking place in Joburg this week with some great speakers.
On Wednesday the MyBroadband Conference takes places at Vodaworld. It is the premier event of its kind in South Africa, attracting IT executives and delegates from around the country. Now in its seventh year it promises to the biggest and best conference yet, with speakers from all the major telecoms players in the country.

Tech4Africa takes place at The Forum, Dimension Data on Thursday and Friday. This is SA’s premier mobile, web & emerging technology conference, bringing global perspective to the African context.