Quote #1: "Facebook's privacy settings allow users to shield personal information from public view. But because the socialbots posed as friends, they were able to extract some 46,500 email addresses and 14,500 physical addresses from users' profiles– information that could be used to launch phishing attacks or aid in identity theft."
Quote #2: "Socialbots behave differently to humans that enter Facebook for the first time, in part because they have no real-world friends to connect with, and their random requests lead to an unusually high number of rejections. FIS would be able to use this pattern to recognize and block an attack of socialbots, says Stein. That would put Facebook back on top– if only until hackers release their next innovation."
Quote #3: "But inside Facebook's network it's much more persuasive. "It's easier to exploit trust relationships in online social networks," says Justin Ma, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who develops methods to combat email spam."
Read this article for more info...
I guess this is me telling some of you you may want to pay a wee bit more attention to who you are FB friending. I think this is one of the reasons I'm going to stick with checking on the Twitter accounts of peeps making friend requests. I find that people actively conversing on Twitter are usually also pretty active in Facebook. If they're not hanging out being social across several social media accounts I'm now thinking the person is potentially a zombie socialbot instead of a live person (and aint gonna friend ya - LOL).
Comments(6)