If you walked by your coworker today and saw hardcore porn filling her screen, there may be an innocent explanation. Some sort of hack is currently spewing porn and gore all over Facebook. It's a porn flood! 
 
 For the last couple days, Facebook has been "inundated with pornographic images and links," reader Adam Sank tells us. 
 
 They appear as updates on your news feed, but they're attributed to users who have nothing to do with their being posted. The pictures are REALLY graphic — a closeup of a woman fingering herself, an erect dick, etc. Facebook seems to be at a loss as to how to stop this from happening. It's kind of funny, but also scary when you're at work and your boss walks past your computer just as a giant cock appears on your screen. 
 
 I haven't personally seen any porn, but Sank sent a screenshot of his newsfeed graced with a hugely tumescent dude as proof. (We'll spare you the sight.) 
 
 It's not just porn, either. The sorts of things you'd find on an average trip to 4chan are now just popping up in innocent user's newsfeeds. Actress Courtney Zito told the Christian Post today, "Just saw one with a guy who had his skull bashed in and his brains on the street. Another one was the devil... Besides the countless naked girls. I'm about ready to deactivate…" 
 
 Judging from the huge stream of complaints on Twitter, the smut and gore is cutting a wide swath on Facebook. Here are a few tweets from a one minute span: 
 
 IBTREY: "Yep Facebook done turned into a porn site" 
 
 seanniex: "Why is Facebook turning into porn?" 
 
 DriveA_Lexus: Facebook Is officially a porn site.... All I see is sex photos and videos. 
 
 BriannaLaughlin: I can't go on facebook anymore because it's a legit porn site. 
 
 One particular memorable picture making the rounds is something called "Jesus porn?" 
 
 Embattled Facebook users have been organizing anti-porn pages, like "I remember when Facebook WASN'T a porn site!" 
 
 Worms and scams aren't uncommon on Facebook, but the porn flood appears to be of a different magnitude than most Facebook exploits. What's going on? One potential lead: hackers associated with Anonymous claimed last week to be developing a powerful "Guy Fawkes virus" with which they would attack Facebook. Spamming gore and porn is definitely one of Anonymous' trademark moves. 
 
 Facebook must be fuming at this defilement of their users' pure white news feeds. Its prude moderators censor a even a tasteful drawing of a nude woman if it looks too realistic. It's the internet: Porn finds a way. 
 
 [Photo, top, via Shutterstock.com] ||||| Update: Facebook: images of porn, violence due to coordinated spam attack. 
 
 Last night, reports came in suggesting Facebook users have been experiencing a flood of very graphic images depicting pornography, acts of violence, self-mutilation, and bestiality for the last few days. I contacted Facebook when I first heard, and the company confirmed the NSFW problem with me this morning. 
 
 "Facebook is aware of these reports and we are investigating the issue," a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement. I responded by asking how many users are affected, what Facebook believes has happened, and what is being done, but I haven't heard back yet. If you are affected by this, please see Facebook virus or account hacked? Here's how to fix it. 
 
 Update: A little over two hours later, Palo Alto has sent along a slightly more detailed statement. "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. We have recently experienced an increase in reports and we are investigating and addressing the issue." 
 
 The company representative also said more information will be shared when it is known. In the meantime, the following is what we know so far. 
 
 Some members of the social network are complaining about violent and/or pornographic pictures showing up in their News Feeds without their knowledge that they have allegedly Liked. Others are being told by their friends that they are sending requests to click on links to videos, sending out bogus chat messages, or writing mass messages and tagged photos leading people to believe they are in the link. 
 
 In other words, this is the type of spam we've seen on Facebook before, but it's coming in at a much faster pace, as if it was something planned in advance. It's currently unclear if users are required to click on something to start spreading the spam, or if this is an actual attack leveraging some kind of vulnerability in the service's code. 
 
 Users are unsurprisingly outraged and as is typical with Facebook members, many are already threatening to close their accounts. I personally have not seen any such Facebook activity on my own profile, and neither have my friends, but the social networking giant has confirmed that something is up. The service's users complain about a lot of things but this is not a small issue. That being said, it's still not known how many of the site's 800 million active users are affected. 
 
 Some are thinking this is an attack, and are already blaming the hacktivist group Anonymous, which was rumored to be planning to take down the social network on November 5. Three months ago, the larger collective made a point to say it did not support such a takedown operation and in the end it did not take place: the service has remained operational all month. 
 
 Facebook is still up and running, but that doesn't mean it hasn't been exploited in some way. There is no proof that Anonymous is behind this flood of inappropriate images and links (normally such an attack would result in confirmation from Anonymous, in some shape or form), but it only takes a few members or ex-members to pull something like this off. 
 
 This is a developing story: I will continue updating you as Facebook's investigation progresses. 
 
 See also: ||||| Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period. ||||| If your computer screen is visible to anyone else in your office, you may want to avoid visiting Facebook today. Your news feed may be a little more, um, interesting than usual. Many news sources are reporting that the site has been hit with a massive spam attack that is resulting in people unknowingly posting hardcore porn and images of violence and dead animals. Graham Culey of the Sophos Naked Security blog quotes a tweet that sums up what people are seeing: "I saw a dead dog, Justin Bieber sucking a d***, and a naked grandma. Time to delete Facebook." 
 
 Facebook tells ZDnet that it's "aware of these reports and [is] investigating the issue." 
 
 My own Facebook news feed is image-spam free. As Reddit notes, your news feed is more likely to be full of spam images if your friends are stupid unwise enough to fall for malicious link attacks. If they're the type who might get the message, "OMG, I can't believe Kim did this" or "Wow, I can't believe you did this in this video. I LOLed," and then click on a link in that message, then you may end up with naked Grandmas and photoshopped teen idols in your feed. (And if you're the type of person that clicks on the links in those messages, then you're probably flooding your friends' Facebook news feed with graphic death photos right now.) 
 
 Alternately, if you've always had a secret desire to post porn on Facebook, here's your chance. After posting it, make sure to follow up quickly with a status update in all caps about having been hacked.
– Forbes has a warning for you: "You may not want to check Facebook at work today." Why? Because, as numerous outlets are reporting, your news feed may have been inundated with porn and disturbing images thanks to a huge spam attack. One tweet sums it up: "I saw a dead dog, Justin Bieber sucking a d***, and a naked grandma. Time to delete Facebook." It appears users are unknowingly posting the images; most likely, the users in question clicked on malicious links. (Forbes offers an example: "Wow, I can’t believe you did this in this video. I LOLed.") There also appears to have been an increase in reports of spammy links like the above. Facebook confirms to ZDnet it is "aware of these reports" and "investigating the issue." So far, no one seems to know who or what is behind the attack, though some have blamed Anonymous.