Facebook has closed a hole that was being used by spammers to automatically post wall messages and direct messages to friends, the company said on Tuesday.

“Earlier this week, we discovered a bug that made it possible for an application to bypass our normal CSRF (cross-site request forgery) protections through a complicated series of steps. We quickly worked to resolve the issue and fixed it within hours of discovering it,” Facebook said in a statement. “For a short period of time before it was fixed, several applications that violated our policies were able to post content to people’s profiles if those people first clicked on a link to the application.”

Facebook users should be wary of suspicious-looking links, even if they come from friends.

AllFacebook called it ”one of the fastest spreading scams we’ve seen on Facebook to date, and also one of the largest security glitches in the Facebook platform.”

The scam comes just days after Facebook fixed a similar bug in its photo-uploading process that allowed a spammer to post photos to people’s profiles that had not been approved.

re-posted from The Austin Geek Blog