A UK member of parliament has admitted to having his Facebook account hijacked.

Lichfield Conservative Michael Fabricant said last week that his account was taken over and used to send spam messages to some 1,500 users on the MP's friend list.

According to Fabricant, a message was sent to his account which then redirected to a malicious site. The stolen account information was used to take control of the account and perform the attack on other users.

The attack is similar to others spotted on Facebook in recent weeks. Victims were directed to an external phishing site which attempted to duplicate the Facebook login screen and harvest account details for spam runs.

"This has never happened to me before and I can only apologise," Fabricant wrote on his blog. "If any of my Facebook Friends get a message from me called 'look at this', don't! I did when I received a similar message and look what happened to me."

Fabricant is hardly the first high-profile user to have account details for a social networking site stolen. Earlier this year, a hacker was able to compromise multiple celebrity Twitter accounts and post embarrassing messages.

Later in the year, an administrator from a rival blogging site exploited a vulnerability in Twitter to conduct another spam attack.