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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