  Facebook is the world's largest Online Social Network, having more than 1
billion users. Like most other social networks, Facebook is home to various
categories of hostile entities who abuse the platform by posting malicious
content. In this paper, we identify and characterize Facebook pages that engage
in spreading URLs pointing to malicious domains. We used the Web of Trust API
to determine domain reputations of URLs published by pages, and identified 627
pages publishing untrustworthy information, misleading content, adult and child
unsafe content, scams, etc. which are deemed as "Page Spam" by Facebook, and do
not comply with Facebook's community standards. Our findings revealed dominant
presence of politically polarized entities engaging in spreading content from
untrustworthy web domains. Anger and religion were the most prominent topics in
the textual content published by these pages. We found that at least 8% of all
malicious pages were dedicated to promote a single malicious domain. Studying
the temporal posting activity of pages revealed that malicious pages were more
active than benign pages. We further identified collusive behavior within a set
of malicious pages spreading adult and pornographic content. We believe our
findings will enable technologists to devise efficient automated solutions to
identify and curb the spread of malicious content through such pages. To the
best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt in literature, focused
exclusively on characterizing malicious Facebook pages.
