Risks with Social Networking sites

The other night my wife received an invite to join Facebook from a good friend. Having two pre-teen kids, I thought it was a good idea for us to join to learn more about it before they were asking about it.

But a couple of things got my ‘spidey-sense’ tingling in the process. It asked to upload all of her email contacts. This feature seems like a clever way for you to quickly find out if people you know already have accounts. But it also gets you to give up those acquaintances’ email address. Hmmm

Also it seemed to me the more info you give up, (what you like, where you work, who your friends are) the more info the harvesting fraudster might get for possible use in a scam. Apparently I’m not the only one who thinks so! Here’s something from the BBC on the topic – Cyber thieves target social sites

Here’s another post - Phishing Social Networking Sites where the author actually interviews a phisher!

One of the comments from his article that sounds like a good actionable item -

The second is that the password is used in more than one place 50% of the time - we already knew that but it’s interesting to hear it from a phisher’s perspective on how that’s actually useful to help monetize the attack.

There is no new lesson learned here, just another reminder to be wary of what you say about yourself and to follow the tips from Mom!

One final thought on Facebook - they have a program called "Beacon" that created a little uproar in the online community about a month ago. This 'feature' would automatically tell your online friends what you've purchased from other websites.

1-11 Update! - this just in - someone has published a 'poisoned page' on myspace - if a user clicks on it, it will download a serious of attacks. ouch!

1-15 Update! getting a secret crush from facebook is one you don't want!