How can you tell if a Facebook account is fake? Barracuda Labs is on the case.

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Scammers will seize any angle they can to try to reel in the unsuspecting, and the initial public offering announced by Facebook yesterday is no exception.

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Once reported by the media, any new attempt to impersonate Facebook in an email requesting information from recipients seems to fade off the radar.

That might be the result of an open-source technology called DMARC that Facebook Engineer Michael Adkins has been working with since 2010, in partnership with others.

He explains in a blog post on the social network:

DMARC allows a domain owner to request aggregated, anonymized data from mailbox providers about email that appears to be from their domain.  This allows the domain owner to gauge how serious their phishing problem is and lets them audit their own infrastructure for accurate deployment of DKIM and SPF, the two domain authentication technologies DMARC uses.

Once they are sure all of their real email is authenticated, DMARC allows the domain owner to ask mailbox providers not to deliver unauthenticated email from their domain.  The end result is that users won’t get email that claims to be from a facebook.com or facebookmail.com address unless it really is from Facebook.

More than half of Facebook users are worried about timeline, according to a poll of 4,110 people by Sophos.

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Facebook security offered more details on yesterday’s announcement that it was teaming up with the attorney general’s office in the state of Washington to take on scams on the social network.

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Facebook is adding lots of new friends in Washington, D.C., if the company’s fourth quarter lobbying report is any indication.

Marking a Facebook first, the company’s lobbying budget broke through the million dollar ceiling last year based on the fourth quarter reports filed recently.

While the final 2011 lobbying figures will be reported later this month, estimates put the last year’s lobbying budget at $1.35 million.

Papers filed with the U.S. government Friday reveal that Facebook spent $440,000 on lobbying in the last quarter of 2011, up 30 percent from the same period a year ago and a whopping 85 percent increase over the $38,117 spent in 2009.

Facebook’s fourth-quarter lobbying budget was the most the company spent in any reporting period last year.

However, Facebook’s lobbying budget is still dwarfed by the amount spent by other major Internet and technology companies.

In comparison, Google spent $3.76 million in the last quarter of 2011.

The increased outreach to policymakers appears to be an industry trend.

Most tech companies — actually most companies and industry trade associations — saw a marked increase in their lobbying budgets in the fourth quarter of 2011 over the same period last year.

One reason could be the business community’s increased confidence in the economy.

Employment figures have been slowly ticking upward. And Congress is generally more active in the year before a presidential election.

It will be interesting to see if Facebook’s federal lobbying budget holds steady or grows in 2012. While the federal government — Congress, the White House and various agencies — will continue to work on issues like privacy, the real action this year will be in the presidential and congressional races, as well as local and state races.

So, how did Facebook spend a cool million in the nation’s capital?

Facebook may have laid the groundwork in 2011 for their recent victory against the Stop Online Piracy Act.

And the social network recently reached a much publicized deal with the Federal Trade Commission over the privacy of consumer data.

The social network also expanded its Washington D.C. office last year, adding top political talent. Additional staff generally portends more activity, and Facebook has been active on several fronts in 2011. The company participated in the recent Hackathon on Capitol Hill and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg met with lawmakers to discuss small business issues.

Facebook’s filing states that its representatives met with members of Congress as well as federal agencies, including the U.S. Trade Representative’s office, the U.S. Department of Commerce and the U.S. Department of State, to name a few.

Topping the list of issues Facebook lobbied on were privacy, online security and safety. Specifically, the company names the Child Online Protection Act, mobile Internet access issues, the Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights and the Do-Not-Track Online Act, as well as the Irish Data Protection Act.

Members of Congress are using Facebook in different ways –from buying ads to conducting town halls – -as a vehicle to boost engagement with constituents and expand their support online.  Facebook is still a relatively new platform on Capitol Hill, and the social network plans to educate lawmakers about how best to use the technology.

Update: A Facebook spokesman shared this statement with us via email:

Do you think Facebook should be spending increased amounts of money on federal lobbying?

The seemingly never-ending conflict between Israel and its Mideast neighbors has spread to Facebook, as an Israeli hacker who goes by the name of Hannibal posted the email addresses and passwords of 85,000 users of the social network from Saudi Arabia and Iran.

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Message to Check Point Software Technologies: Make sure you have your facts straight before assigning an infographic to an illustrator. The vendor put out a release saying one in five links posted to Facebook’s news feed lead to viruses, when in fact the social network blocks unsafe URLs on up to 20 percent of shares that go up to the site.

It was only a matter of time before scammers took advantage of Facebook users’ disdain for the new timeline profile.

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Facebook and the Office of the Irish Data Protection Commissioner publicly released the results of a detailed three-month audit of the social network’s privacy policies in the European Union region, but what steps did the social network agree to implement?

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