News from the front in Facebook's battle against the porn-and-gore spam that hit the site early this week. Facebook says it's triumphing over the Justin Bieber smut and animal snuff pics.

It has been an epic struggle, pitting the world's largest social network against some of the world's largest penises. But Facebook told the BBC this morning that the smut flood has been staunched to just a trickle of dicks. The company said it was the target of a "coordinated spam attack," and that they've already identified the culprit. A source tells the BBC that it wasn't someone from hacktivist collective Anonymous, though the porn flood had all the trademarks of an Anonymous attack.

According to a Facebook statement, the flood was caused by the attacker tricking users into pasting a line of code into their browser URL bar, which then caused them to spam their friends with gross images. If you've been hit by the porn flood, check out Lifehacker's guide to dealing with it. (I mean, if you've got a problem with a porn flood. Different strokes...)

If you never saw the porn flood, pat yourself on the back: Your friends are smarter than the average Facebook user.

[image via Getty]