The “new” idea of “social hacking” is that many social details are on view via social networking sites such as Facebook. A competent social hacker can find information which tends to give away security question answers. So that rather than rummaging through dustbins for passwords, social hackers simply rely on their Google-Fu.

In a survey of 500 children, between 12 and 18, and 500 parents the security company found 40% of teens had gained access to someone else’s social networking profile this way. A further 10% also said they thought it was “cool” or “funny” to impersonate them and 70% admitted they had done this.

Rik Ferguson, senior security adviser at Trend Micro, said children were finding it easy to do this because people are still too free with the personal information they post online.

“It’s not hard for a child to reset someone’s password and gain access to a social networking or Paypal account via Ebay because most of the information needed to do this is on a social networking profile,” he said.

He said there were many applications on social networking sites that could also be used to obtain the information required. One example includes a questionnaire that is sent out to friends on Facebook asking them to list 25 things about themselves. This includes their first kiss, the name of their first teacher and their first love.

“All these answers can then be used when resetting a password as these are normally the questions you are asked when you forget a password on these sites, ” Mr Ferguson said.

The Survey found out that boys are twice more likely to try their hands at breaking into someone else’s profile to impersonate them whereas girls are three times more likely than boys to try to access other people’s online shopping accounts and even bank accounts without permission to get access to money

Girls are More Practical than Boys…..

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All of the profile owners were 18 years old and living in the United States.

Some 54 per cent of the profiles contained references to risky behaviors. One-quarter of the profiles examined mentioned sexual behaviors while 44 per cent referred to substance abuse. Almost one in three spoke about alcohol use while 14 per cent referred to violence.

The study, published in the current issue of Archives of Paediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, found that teenagers, whose profiles indicated religious involvement or had references to active participation in a sport or hobby, were less likely to contain any kind of risky information.

“Once we started getting the findings, we wondered, why are they doing this?” Moreno said. “Do they not get it? And, if they don’t understand that this is public, can we send them a cautionary message to let them know just how public their information really is?”

More than 90 percent of teens in the United States have access to the Internet, according to background information from the studies. About half of all teens who use the Internet also use social networking sites, such as MySpace and Facebook and about one-quarter of those belong to teens under 18.

Kimberly Mitchell, the author of an accompanying editorial in the same issue of the journal and a research professor at the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, “It’s important for parents to understand how important these social networking sites are to kids,” she said. “They’re here to stay, and they’re not all evil. There can be some really positive aspects to these sites. But adolescents aren’t necessarily thinking 10 years ahead, when employers or college administrators may look at these sites. Teens live in the here and now, so parents need to talk to kids about the longer-term impacts and help them think through some of the repercussions.”

Moreno suggested that parents ask teens to show them their MySpace or Facebook pages. “Teens will definitely balk, but they balk at lots of things, like curfews,” she said. “Some parents feel it’s a violation of privacy, like reading a diary, but it’s out there, it’s public.”

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Beacon sends messages to members friends about what they are purchasing online. If the member booked a trip to Japan on Travelocity.com, for example, friends on Facebook would know it. If the member purchased a ticket to “American Gangster,” that would also be known among friends.


Facebook backpedaled. The social-networking site now says it won’t send messages about members’ Internet activities without getting approval each and every time. Members will opt in to the program.

When Facebook launched the program on November 6, it wasn’t positioned as a Big Brother scenario. The new advertising solution was positioned as an option to share actions on other sites with friends on Facebook.

“Just as Facebook shares your on-site interactions with your friends through News Feed, we now give you an option to let News Feed share your off-site actions with your friends as well,” explained Leah Pearlman, the product manager for Facebook ads, in the company blog.

MoveOn.org launched its petition on November 20, saying Beacon was an invasion of privacy. The petition reads, “Site like Facebook must respect my privacy. They should not tell my friends what I buy on.

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“Friends account deleted, Limited in sending message or poking, stupid new layout ! Administrators don’t care about what we think ! But what will happen if we all decide to stay off of facebook for 1 day !”

On July 21, Facebook rolled out a redesign of the site, based on feedback from 100,000 users (The Facebook Blog). The redesign was aimed at making it easier for users to access the content they want most while improving site speed. Among the most visible changes was the categorical division of a user’s Profile page into tabbed pages, as opposed to having every type of media an individual uses on the site awkwardly laid out on one page.

The new design was immediately hit by a backlash of users who were surprised by the extent of the changes. Two of the redesign protest groups on Facebook currently have nearly 4.5 million members collectively. Among other complaints are that the privacy settings are not clear or strict enough, so that a user’s information may be shared with unknown parties without the user’s knowledge.

It is unclear at this time whether Facebook will make any changes due to the boycott. However, an exchange on Yahoo! Answers suggests that the protest is having an impact.

A second protest event on Facebook is scheduled for January 9 through January 12, 2009.

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The study has claimed that the short statement, which can be seen by hundreds of online friends, reveals much more about you than you think.


Psychologist and author Dr Michael Carr-Gregg said that people who use it could be suffering from insecurity. “You’re sending a message out to everybody that rather than just quietly getting on with what you’re doing you need external recognition,”

Carr-Gregg claimed that people who post updates about feeling depressed were actually seeking attention, and he cautioned that such behavior could ultimately prove to be dangerous.

“This is a digital SOS. They can be very, very upsetting when you send out something and you get absolutely nothing back. You could be forgiven for thinking no one cares, but not everybody is online or checking their phone all the time,” he said.

Also, he revealed that updates about children could turn out to be quite boring for others.

“Parental pride is understandable, we’re allowed to be proud about our children milestones but the tragedy is that nobody else gives a stuff,” he said.

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Carole Theriault, senior security consultant at the company, said that Facebook ‘has sky rocketed in importance and everyone loves it’, which means cyber criminals will enjoy it too.


‘Spammers and hackers basically follow the trend, so it is not surprising at all that they are attacking Facebook and using Facebook to send out spam,’ she said.

However, Ms Theriault revealed that users of the social networking site can protect themselves from attack.

‘One of the main ways that you can try and combat this and work at this is by setting your [configuration] options,’ she said.

However, personally i feel that facebook have so many security issues that even setting your configurations spammers and criminals still have many ways to access your accounts. So we should be really careful while using facebook and any other social networking sites. Especially the teenagers and young girls.

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Ask any college student and they will tell you that they have a love-hate relationship with Facebook. They love how it lets them connect with friends all over the world but hates how it seemingly devours their time. However, the scale seems to tip more towards the hate side, as it is now responsible for landing more and more students in sticky situations with the school and the law.

Many teens say they know someone who has landed in trouble for a Facebook posting. Teachers and administrators, they say, are cruising Facebook looking for incriminating evidence. Todd from Paul VI Catholic received a “friend request” from someone he thought was a pretty new girl coming to the school. The guys were excited. “She never showed up,” Todd says. He thinks it was an administrator. “I don’t see it being a kid—that’d be the lamest prank ever.”

It’s possible that school administrators are creating fake profiles to search online for bad behavior, but some say they don’t bother. Parents and other students bring pictures to the school’s attention.

“The information is readily available without us having to go trolling for it,” says Michael Doran, principal of Rockville’s Wootton High.

Student officers also gave out color-coded bracelets based on the amount of personal information that kids posted on their profiles. Students who listed cell numbers got yellow bracelets; kids who gave out a home number, address, or work information got red.

“We followed one girl home from work and videotaped it, showing how easy it was for somebody to stalk you,” says guidance counselor Jennifer Taylor. “We got her permission and showed it in our assembly.”

To illustrate the ugliness of Wootton talk online, the student government pulled quotes and wall messages from students’ profiles and posted them without attribution around the building. Among the quotes:

Not Jewish, thank you very much.
I hate dumb people, especially blonds with a lot of acne.
I love getting high.
Rape is not a crime—it’s surprise sex.

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Private Facebook profiles aren’t quite as hidden as many users might think they are. Pages that are supposedly restricted are visible to anyone using searches based on religion, sexual orientation or relationship status.

Security researcher Christopher Soghoian announced the flaw on Tuesday. A quick search by Wired News for women in a major U.S. city who were interested in random hookups with men revealed the names and photos of two high school girls, including one ninth grader.


Like many social networks, the increasingly popular Facebook allows its users to mark their profile page as private, semiprivate or open. However, even if you mark your profile to be visible only by friends, that doesn’t change how you turn up in Facebook searches or whether your profile is open to indexing by search engines.

Instead, users looking for privacy must also change their preferences under search, else their profiles will be indexed by internet search engine spiders and their names, photos and personal data fields will be searchable by any Facebook member who is a fellow member of a “group” such as a school or geographic area that the user elects to join.

For instance, if you are a Facebook member of your college, you could run a search to see all the people who are Christian women who are lesbians, all the women interested in women or all the Muslim men into other men. Your search results will likely include people who thought they marked their information as private, but didn’t also change their search settings. (These links all require a valid Facebook account.)

Searchers still can’t click through to the full profile for members who chose to make the profile visible only to their Facebook friends.

Soghoian first discovered the discrepancy in September 2006 and revisited it after speaking with attendees at a privacy conference last week, who suggested that the setup could violate European privacy standards.

Soghoian, a graduate student previously known for disclosing holes in both airport security and Firefox browser extensions, contends that the number of people whose private profiles show up in search results is clear proof that Facebook’s options are too confusing.

“There is an easy way to fix this at the individual level,” Soghoian said. “But the fact that so many people haven’t done it easily demonstrates that opt-out privacy doesn’t work.”

Facebook is no stranger to privacy concerns. Last September, the networking site faced a minor riot from its members following a unilateral change in how other members learn of changes to a user profile.

A Facebook representative did not respond to a request for comment and Soghoian says his attempts to reach Facebook’s privacy person were foiled when a receptionist told him that the individual did not take outside phone calls. A company representative responded to an email to privacy@facebook.com by thanking Soghoian for his note and said that the company would “certainly keep it in mind.”

Facebook users who set their profile to private and want to keep their name and photo out of searches can do using the search preference page.

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