Facebook and f8 - two of life's f-words?

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 29 September 2011 11:36

Opinion and Analysis

Yawn. Another Facebook development, another privacy besmirchment and probably another upcoming Zuckerbergian apology. Can anyone remind me again why they choose to live a privacy-free Facebook life?

Facebook. It's one of life's F-words. If you're a Facebook user, you've probably uttered the f-word from time to time when using it, or when newly discovering some aspect of your privacy has been newly f-ed up.

Symantec and Kaspersky-challenger, BitDefender, has identified a few issues that may f-things up for Facebook and its long-suffering users.

These include the risks of 'flooding the site with Twitter-style spambots and an increase in targeted attacks on its users'.

BitDefender notes that the f8 dev conference 'pushed usability and privacy to a new level' with features like 'Subscribers, News Ticker and Wall facelifts, the new Timeline and the new Open Graph', but with these new features comes the threat of 'increased privacy and security breaches', which is so very typically 'Facebook'. Two steps forward, one step back, it would seem.

Anyway, one of the chief BitDefenders, and head of BitDefender's online threats lab, the alliteratively named Catalin Colosi, has five (another f-word) key concerns about the 'new' Facebook.

Mr Colosi says that: 'With the new Facebook features and changes, users need to be more vigilant than ever before when it comes to knowing what personal information they are sharing and with whom. The main concern is that users are opted-in by default to share updates, which increases the risk of accidentally sharing a page, an event or an activity that they did not intend for others to see. As such, we recommend Facebook users to conduct a careful audit of the personal information they are sharing, once these new changes take into effect.'

So, what are those five areas of concern Mr Colosi wants to catch our attention with?

The first is Smart Lists. Mr Colosi states that: 'Smart Lists will prompt users to share more information publicly, but will also have the adverse effect of supplying ammunition for targeted attacks.'

Mr Colosi continues: 'Smart Lists encourages people to complete their profile with details of their career, work projects, where they went to school or which city they live in. Every time someone creates a list with colleagues from a specific job, this is tagged in their profile.

'Of course, this is generally not confidential information, and the user has the final decision on whether to approve or reject the tag. But having this information public and indexable will make it much easier to create sophisticated, targeted attacks. Attackers will be able to find out exactly who is working for a specific company at any given time, their job and, more importantly, what project(s) they are working on.

'The additional information available to a hacker may lead to an increase in socially engineered attacks on businesses, where hackers attempt to gain access to a company's network or confidential information by targeting its employees as the point of entry.'

What about the other four concerns? Please click on over to page two, where the potential f-ups continue!