Just a day after Facebook announced its democratic approach towards its users, the social networking site was attacked by scammers. On Friday, the users of Facebook were victimized by a rogue application.

Facebook reported that a rogue program was spamming users and exposing their information. The rogue program was sending notification messages to user profiles claiming that a friend had reported the user for violating Facebook's terms of service. The message was offering a link to click to find out more information.

The message was saying that “a friend of the recipient has just reported you to Facebook for violating our Terms of Service. - This is your official warning! - [Click here to find out why you were reported!] - Request Facebook look at what has happened and rule immediately."

Clicking the link, the users were giving the app access to their profile and personal information and were inadvertently passing on the message to everyone in their Facebook contact list. Actually, the link was leading to an application called "f a c e b o o k -- closing down!!!" Once installed, it spammed the victim's friend list with the same warning message, and possibly gleaned personal information in the process.

Facebook has announced that they have cleared off the rogue application, but it has declined to provide information about the number of users affected.

In an e-mailed statement, Facebook spokesman Simon Axten said, "Our team disabled this application for violating the Facebook Developer Terms of Service. Some additional versions of it have sprung up, and we've disabled these as well. We're actively monitoring the site for others and are working to block the application completely."

In a blog for Sophos, Graham Cluley wrote, "One of the problems is that Facebook allows anybody to write an application, and third-party applications are not vetted before they are made available to the public. So, even as Facebook stamps out one malignant application, it can pop up in another place like a poisoned mushroom with a different name.”

The recent rogue application attacked just less than a week after the rogue application called "The Error Check System" was detected, which had started sending false warnings to users that their friends were having problems viewing their profiles.

Meanwhile, MySpace spokeswoman stated on Friday that the company has fixed a vulnerability that allowed strangers to view private comments of MySpace users.