It’s as if the circus of pornographic horrors has marched into the hallowed, staid halls of Facebook, painting over the frescoes and setting up shops of debauchery on every corner. A new exploit, slowly gathering steam over the past few days, has been hijacking users’ newsfeeds and turning them into a churning cesspit of unwanted graphic imagery. An unchecked deluge of hardcore pornography, gory and violent pictures, and images of animal abuse have gushed out across the social-media site.

According to the Christian Post this morning, part of the exploit appears to be a standard linkspam involving a popular celebrity—in this case Kim Kardashian—suggesting that users click through in order to view a video. The article goes on to say the link then goes on to load a scripted webpage that hijacks the person’s account.

Reporters at Gawker have speculated that this might be related to the hacktivst collective, Anonymous; but unlike the nature of the collective nobody has taken any sort of credit. The behavior of the Anonymous collective is that often the cells seek out anonymous notoriety by pressing their advantage and posting a manifesto along with whatever prank has been devised. The recently-passed Guy Fawke’s Day and its connection to the Anonymous memeplex also brought the possible connection to mind, as Anonymous has promised to bring Facebook to its knees on Nov 5th.

Although, doing so days after the suggested date seems to dilute the connection somewhat.

The user reaction to the problem has been nothing less than staggering revulsion. The imagery being poured through computer screens and into the eyes of unsuspecting Facebook users runs the gamut from Photoshopped images of Justin Bieber in compromising pornographic situations to images of horrifying animal cruelty. Twitter has been aflame with numerous complaints about the horrorshow thrust upon unsuspecting Facebook users and others have been questioning why they use the site at all.

Facebook is not all rainbows and roses: Insecurity reveals the dark underbelly

ZDNet writer Violet Blue weighs in that this sort of cyberprank could be directed at Facebook’s apparent uptight culture—of course it’s shanghai-and-shock sort of attitude makes it feel like more of a middle-finger than a social commentary.

This comes as something of a massive slap in the face to Facebook over their otherwise Victorian conservative attitude and straight-laced approach to social media. As an administration, the current Facebook has never had a very good outlook on adult content and tends to shut it down without reaction. They have also been implicated, repeatedly, for extremely bad policies involving user privacy and account controls—possibly leading directly to the hijacks we’re seeing now.

Account hijack and social engineering scams abound on Facebook, one that took the fight front-and-center by TPing the social media site’s mansion has been bound to come out of the woodwork. We’ve seen scams perpetrated such as “the girl who killed herself on Halloween,” multiple leveraging off celebrity deaths like Amy Winehouse, Steve Jobs, and even Osama bin Ladin. Getting credulous people to click on links—or even accept applications that then can hijack their account appears to be extremely easy.

If anything the recent, weird “Take This Lollipop: I dare you” campaign seems to have been eclipsed by the sheer audacity of this rapidly spreading attack.

This sort of event seems like it would be inevitable. Facebook opened up a real-time updating mechanism that displayed images into feeds to everyone, they have a highly exploitable system with Byzantine privacy- and account-controls, and have already been shown to be a festering pit social engineering worms that repeatedly strike and pass through the site with little in the way of an immune system.

Facebook has contracted the chicken pox—gore-porn pox?—and unless the site gets on the ball with user security and clamps down on the mechanisms by which accounts can be compromised, this sort of event is going to keep happening.