Andrew Noyes, a Facebook representative, told Mashable the following:

“We have recently experienced an increase in reports and we are investigating and addressing the issue.”

There has been much speculation on who originated and orchestrated the recent pornographic spam attack. Some went so far as to claim Anonymous had hacked Facebook and was the culprit. Anonymous has reportedly denied the allegations.

Facebook is blaming malicious javascript that users were tricked into pasting into their web browser’s address bar. Here is another statement they released on the issue this afternoon:

“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.”

So there you have it folks – hackers with superhuman tech skills are not to blame on this one. The common denominator in this and most other scams is careless or uninformed users committing actions that compromise the privacy and security of themselves and others.