Social networking site Facebook is reportedly brewing malware day in and out. Security firm BitDefender reported that one out of the five items in Facebook news feed leads to malicious content. Now that's not surprising since loads of new users are joining Facebook and sharing as well as re-sharing the content posted in the news feed. These statistics come from the users of BitDefender's SafeGo application on Facebook that scans the user account to check for any potential malware spreading links.

BitDefender has analyzed 14,000 Facebook users who downloaded its SafeGo application. According to the statistics, about 60 percent attacks on users Facebook profile or system come from the notifications that are sent out using malicious third-party applications. These malicious malware applications comprise of:

22 percent of these nefarious app claim to offer you details of those who've viewed your profile 15.4 percent Promises bonus items in other popular games like FarmVille, Frontier Ville 11.2 percent offer non-facebook features like Dislike button 7.1 claimed to connect you to Social Network Versions of Super Mario
Websense's Defensio tool free for home users suggested that about 40 percent of all the status messages contain a URL and out of those 10 percent are spam or lead to malicious content.

Truly, Facebook users share links that lead to contests, survey, polls, apps and other suspicious destinations. Of course, the social network promises optimum security of content but you can't do much with links, especially when millions of users are logged in.

A Facebook spokesperson told PCMag in an official statement:

The systems we've built have helped us stay one step ahead of our attackers, so that as we've more than doubled in size over the last year, the actual effect of the attacks on Facebook users hasn't changed. In fact, the tools and systems we've built combined with concerted campaigns to arm users with the information to make smarter and safer decisions online have limited the number of Facebook users impacted by security issues to less than 1 percent, and that's since the founding of the site (more than six years ago).

Users must remember that posting/sharing links through News Feed should be more of a conscious act and not a leisure time activity.