Nexgate Releases First-Ever Global Social Spam List; Publishes Report on Social Spam

SAN FRANCISCO, CA — (Marketwired) — 09/24/13 — , an innovator in social media brand protection and compliance, today announced the availability of a first-of-its-kind to root out spam across branded social media accounts, as well the release of its new 2013 State of Social Spam research report (available at ) from Nexgate-s team of data scientists detailing social media spam techniques and trends taken from analysis of more than 60 million unique social posts and comments including 25 million social media user accounts.

Social media spam is a fast growing attack and exploit vector for cybercriminals. Traditional security defenses, like email and Web filtering are designed to detect spam and malicious content entering the corporate network; however, social media and its spam lives outside the corporate network and on the accounts of the brand itself, thus rendering anti-malware and anti-spam technologies from the leading providers useless.

Investment in social media advertising alone is expected to reach nearly $7 billion in 2013, as marketers scramble to engage customers, partners and prospects on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and the other leading social networks. As the money flows to social media, the bad guys quickly follow with Facebook spam alone generating an estimated $200 million.

According to new research just released in , 1 in 21 social messages contain risky content, and 15% of all social media spam contains a URL to a potentially dangerous source. Brands investing in social media face a four fold threat from this growth in spam, including diversion / dilution of their ROI by hosting spammers- ads, exploitation of their target audience by spammers, and damage to brand trust.

is the first and only such list created to stop spam on branded social media pages across social networks. Available immediately as part of its enterprise social media brand protection and compliance service, the list is compiled from spam and spammers detected across more than 25 million individual social media users accounts, 10,000 branded accounts, and analysis of more than 60 million pieces of social content. Spammers are added to the list based on detection techniques using Nexgate-s patent-pending social content and application classification technology. This complete technology set includes the ability to scan content, the applications being used to publish the content, and the profile that is publishing on social media accounts to identify and automatically remove spam from brand-owned pages based on the classification of spam content, spam apps, and spammer profiles. It also includes coverage for malware, inappropriate content, confidential data, regulated data, and more. Nexgate-s new Global Social Media Spam List is enabled by default for Nexgate customers. Spammers on the list are automatically blocked from posting content to any social media account protected by Nexgate.

Additional findings in the just released include:

Since the start of 2013, social media spam has increased 355%

1 in 21 social media messages across Facebook, YouTube, Google+, and Twitter contain risky content, such adult language, hate speech, private or regulated data, or spam

1 in 200 social media messages contain spam, including lures to adult content and malware

Spammy apps, like-jacking, social bots, and fake accounts are among the most widely used methods of distributing social media spam

5% of social apps are classified as spammy

15% of all spam contains a URL

Spammers often spam at least 23 different social media accounts

“There-s no question social media spam is on the rise and is a real challenge to enterprise brands,” said Alan Webber, Principal at Asymmetric Strategies Group. “As evidenced in Nexgate-s 2013 State of Social Media Spam report, spam volumes increase at a faster rate than content on branded pages. Thus, efficiently addressing this problem is critical to the overall success of social media personnel and brand managers who wish to effectively engage with their customers and prospects.”

“The dramatic rise in social spam is a significant burden to big brands, and is caustic to the ROI of social media marketing programs,” said Devin Redmond, Co-founder and CEO, Nexgate. “Teams that ignore spam are effectively sponsoring it and deteriorating their programs- effectiveness and overall brand trust. The teams that are fighting it are typically struggling because most tools aren-t designed for the sophisticated nature of the problem, and thus they-re left to manually remove spam content via their internal teams resource or expensive outsourcing partners. Given this and the rise in spam volumes, it-s no wonder moderation costs have more than doubled. Just like spam in email, dealing with social media spam requires advanced technology to root out the bad stuff. Nexgate-s robust capabilities mean that enterprise social media teams can automatically and cost-effectively protect their brand and their audience in a more scalable way.”

For more information on Nexgate, its new , or to download the new , visit .

Nexgate provides cloud-based brand protection and compliance for enterprise social media accounts. Its patent-pending technology seamlessly integrates with the leading social media platforms and applications to find and audit brand affiliated accounts, control connected applications, detect and remediate compliance risks, archive communications, and detect fraud and account hacking.

Nexgate is based in San Francisco, California, and is used by some of the world-s largest financial services, pharmaceutical, Internet security, manufacturing, media, and retail organizations to discover, audit and protect their social infrastructure.

  social-account-hacks, social-media-brand-protection, social-media-compliance, social-media-risk