According to USAToday, the company has been fighting the spam operation for six months, Shabnam Shaik, a technical program manager at Facebook, wrote in a post on its security blog Friday.
The unknown group behind the effort had created large numbers of fake accounts, which then “liked” the publishers' pages and posted comments on them.
The group behind the activities used “sophisticated means that try to mask the fact that the accounts are part of the same coordinated operation. They used tricks to avoid detection, including redirecting their traffic through ‘proxies’ that disguised their location,” she wrote.
Facebook believes the campaign’s intent was for the fake accounts to deceptively gain new Facebook friend connections by liking and interacting primarily with publishers' pages so that later those friends could be sent spam.
Facebook did not give numbers for how many publishers' sites were targeted by the campaign nor would it say how many fake accounts were tied to the attempt.
USA TODAY was among the publishers impacted by the spammers. Parent-company Gannett executives had previously noticed and flagged the suspicious activity for Facebook.
"USA TODAY NETWORK takes great pride in our journalism and the trust our consumers and advertising partners have in us. Since we first brought this issue to Facebook’s attention, we have been in close communication with them and look forward to a swift solution that prevents this illegitimate activity from happening on our Facebook page in the future," said Maribel Wadsworth, the chief transformation officer of Gannett and USA TODAY NETWORK.
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