Security Alert
Facebook Pwn tool takes profile info, helps social engineers
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/091311-facebook-pwn-tool-takes-profile-250846.html?hpg1=bn
I log onto facebook, three friend requests and another farmville invite… accept, accept, accept, ignore. And onto the newsfeed.
It would be easy for me to overlook such a dupe. You go to a big school, you don’t want to be rude, if someone has a fake profile, if they look familiar or at least go to your school, you probably accept them. As this article explains, it is apparently a lot easier to dump all my information then I think. Our social networks have incredible advantages, but I don’t believe our security measures can keep up with our lightning paced strides in social media. Over the summer I received an email “from Bank of America” with a link to a website that was supposed to be the log on page. Thankfully I recognized that it wasn’t BOA due to BOA’s security passcode which was missing, and then discovered that this was sent to me via a cornell list serve. Two reasons I was unhappy about this. 1. Except for a couple minor exceptions this email and website were incredibly official looking and did not seem out of the ordinary. 2. I received this from an undergraduate cornell list serve. A list serve I would assume can only be accessed by a few people, and apparently a few hackers.
In relation to class, an interesting aspect that this brings up is, who are you friends with? Something that we spoke about is our acquaintances (weak relations) and how we can use them for networking because they are more likely to know people that we don’t. In another respect, we need to be more and more cautious as to who we add as friends. To think about not only them, but their security practices. If someone hacks them, they have your information too. It seems as if we should worry especially about our weak relations. Just the fact “6 degrees of separation”, is crazy to think about, but more importantly worry some. Cyber attacks can be big and powerful and if we don’t know our friends, or our friends friends or so forth, how do we protect ourself?