One of the reasons that the researchers targeted Facebook was that they believed it would be tougher to crack than other online social networks. That proved not to be the case. For example, the Facebook Immune System (FIS), which is designed to foil malicious activity on the service, only flagged 20 of the socialbotnet's phony personalities. What's more, the only reason those identities were earmarked was because users complained about them as spam.

"In fact, we did not observe any evidence that the FIS detected what was really going on other than relying on users' feedback, which seems to be an essential but potentially dangerous component of the FIS," .

In a statement released to the media, Facebook disputed the researchers' findings because their attacks originated from a trusted university address. It also said that it was able to disable more of the bogus accounts faster than the researchers claimed in their paper. "We have serious concerns about the methodology of the research by the University of British Columbia and we will be putting these concerns to them," a spokesman for the company said.

Earlier this year, the hacker collective known as Anonymous, based on emails it robbed from defense contractor , alleged that the military had plans to , like Facebook, with phony cyber personalities with the intent to gather information for arresting dissidents and activists who operate anonymously online.

Those allegations were given credence later when the U.S. Central Command awarded a to a company named Ntrepid for creating software to create phony online personas to infiltrate social networking sites where terrorists are recruiting manpower and soliciting funds.