Facebook pledges $250K to UAB research team

Facebook announced this week that it is donating $250,000 to the Center for Information Assurance and Joint Forensics Research at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). The social networking giant made the contribution out of recognition for the center's investigation into spammers and malware writers who prey on Facebook's hundreds of millions of users. Particularly, the site called out the UAB team for its work on the Koobface worm, which wreaked havoc on Facebook and other social networking sites, mainly in 2008 and 2009. The group behind the threat ultimately was outed following a takedown of its command-and-control hub.