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Avoid Social Networking Dangers
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Avoid Social Networking Dangers

By: Ted Hastings

Social networking sites, MySpace, Facebook and Bebo, and have climbed in popularity recently. They allow users to keep in contact with their friends and meet new ones, but they can also expose them to viruses, spyware and other online dangers. As the use of Web 2.0 applications, like wikis, blogs and social networking sites increases, they attract the attention of cyber criminals. Many of the people who use these sites are relatively new to the Internet and they can lack experience in dealing with online threats.

Many of the threats discussed in this article are historical. They have now been countered by site owners, but new ones will appear as attackers develop their methods in response to improved security. Social networking sites can spread threats very quickly, due to their interactive nature. This makes them very attractive as targets. Many threats take advantage of the fact that people trust their friends, and fail to realize how important it is to treat electronic communications with care, irrespective of their apparent source.

As with other aspects of Internet use, threats can be split into two categories: behavior-based and technology-based.

Behavior-Based Threats

Behavior-based threats arise because users are not careful enough about the personal information they put in their online profiles, making themselves vulnerable to identity theft and phishing attacks. Users often publish information about their friends or workmates, their likes and dislikes, their jobs and hobbies without realizing that this information is valuable to identity thieves as it can help them improve their credibility.

After carrying out research on a random sample of Facebook users carried out by Sophos, an IT security company, showed that 41% were prepared to give out personal information like as email address, date of birth and phone number to a complete stranger. The researchers created a fictitious Facebook profile for a green plastic frog named Freddi and sent out 200 friend requests to random users all over the planet. 87 of the users contacted replied and 82 of them supplied personal information, like email addresses, date of birth, details about their education or workplace, address and phone number, as well as photos of friends and family and information about partners, hobbies and likes and dislikes.

Internet Safety website Get Safe Online found in 2007 that one in four British social networking users had posted confidential personal information, such as their address or phone number or on their profiles. 13% of users had posted information or photos of other people online without their permission. This figure increased to an alarming 27% among 18-24 year-olds.

Phishing isn't the only threat to be found on social networking websites. Eleven students at a high school near Toronto were suspended for posting comments about their principal on Facebook after the school imposed a ban on electronic devices and implemented a uniform policy. A school spokesman described the comments as vulgar and profane and claimed that they amounted to amounted to cyber-bullying.

Several stories have claimed that young girls have been raped by older men who first met them via MySpace or Facebook, but none of these stories appear to have been conclusively proved. However, it remains a major problem that social networking sites can offer an opportunity for men to meet young girls in an unsupervised environment, something which should be of great concern to parents.

Technology-Based

Social networking sites can also be a source of technology-based threats. They allow millions of users to post content, so it's almost inevitable that some of these will be malicious individuals who will try to post viruses or spyware.

At the beginning of 2008 more than three million Facebook users were infected with spyware in less than four days. A widget named "Secret Crush" or "My Admirer" is thought to have been downloaded by one and a half million users. It claimed that it would tell users who had a secret crush on them, but actually tricked them into downloading the infamous Zango spyware, which spread by asking unsuspecting users to forward it to five friends.

Anti-virus vendor Symantec has claimed that vulnerabilities which could be used by hackers to snatch control of Windows PCs have been found in ActiveX controls offered to users by both Facebook and MySpace for uploading images to their pages via Internet Explorer (IE). The insecure controls are based on an ActiveX control named Image Uploader, produced by Aurigma Inc.

MySpace was forced to shut down briefly in late 2005 after more than a million users were infected by the Samy worm, written by 19-year old Samy Kamkar. The worm added a million friends to his profile within a few hours, placing the string "but most of all, Samy is my hero" on each of their profiles. Kamkar was eventually sentenced to three years of probation and ordered to perform 90 days of community service.

In January 2008 the biggest privacy breach to date on a social networking site occurred when a 17-gigabyte file containing more than half a million pictures lifted from private MySpace profiles showed up on BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer file sharing service. A security flaw, first reported in Autumn 200, gave hackers access to the photo galleries of some MySpace users who had set their profiles to private, the default setting for users under 16 years of age. This allowed pedophiles and voyeurs who used it to target 14- and 15-year-old users.

Brazilian users of Google's Orkut application were attacked in December 2007 by a worm that attempted to take control of their computers and steal their bank account details. It spread via booby-trapped links placed on the personal page of Orkut users and infected users when they viewed messages that came from friends who had already been exposed.

This loophole was closed quickly, but another worm, called Scrapkut, appeared on Orkut early in 2008. It seemed harmless at first, but it was soon discovered that it could intercept login sessions at several Brazilian banking Web sites and replace components with a fake authentication prompt which could capture the users' logon credentials.

YouTube has also been used indirectly to infect sites with malware. Many Internet users have received spam messages asking them to click on an attached YouTube video clip. The link actually takes them to a fake YouTube sight where they are told that they must install Adobe Flash Player to play the video. Clicking the supplied download link causes a file called install_flash_player.exe. This is the same name as the real Flash installer, but it actually installs a Trojan known as Trojan-Dropper.W32/Agent.

How Can You Protect Yourself?

We've considered some of the dangers that can be found on social networking sites, but what steps can you take to protect yourself against them? Fortunately, most of the technoology-based attacks can be prevented by the usual software defenses, ie: anti-virus software will protect you against viruses, Trojans and worms, anti-spyware programs will protect you against spyware and adware. A good-quality firewall will protect you against hackers and Internet safety suites will protect you against a variety of threats.

Behavior-based attacks, which rely on persuading users to behave in an unsafe manner, are more difficult to deal with as they can only be countered by a change in user behavior. The Get Safe Online website provides a number of guidelines for networking safely, including the following:

Don't let peer pressure push you into doing something you're not comfortable with.

Avoid publishing information which can identify you, eg: phone numbers, pictures of your home, workplace or school, your address, birthday or full name.

Choose a user name that doesn't include any personal information.

Set up a free email account (eg: Yahoo or GMail) that doesn't resemble your real name and use that to register and receive mail from the site.

Use a robust password with eight or more characters.

Avoid making comments or publishing photos which could embarrass you later.

Use the privacy features on the site to control access to your profile.

Watch out for phishing scams.

If you ensure that your software defenses are strong and up-to-date and follow the above guidelines you should be able to enjoy surfing on social networking sites without problems.

Young children should never be allowed access to the Internet in an unsupervised environment. The computer should be located in a family area, such as a lounge or dining room, not hidden away in a bedroom. With older children you should try to monitor their Facebook or MySpace profiles and be on the lookout for any changes in behavior which might suggest that they are encountering online problems.

Article Source: http://articlenexus.com

Ted Hastings has over 35 years experience of IT and education. He has written a textbook on Internet Safety Skills and writes a popular blog entitled Surf Safely. Grab a totally unique version of this article from the Uber Article Directory

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