Not Among Friends: The Dangers of Social Networks
Artwork: Chip TaylorFor many people, social networking has become as much of a daily routine as brewing coffee and brushing teeth. IT administrators dislike it and cyber crooks depend on it.
That's because most of the time people spend on MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and elsewhere is during work hours -- on work machines.
At the ShmooCon 2009 security conference in the nation's capital recently, two security researchers demonstrated the many reasons why this is bad.
In a presentation called "Fail 2.0: Further Musings on Attacking Social Networks," Nathan Hamiel and Shawn Moyer guided attendees through attacks made easy because of the very nature of these sites, where users can upload and exchange pictures, text, music and other content with little effort.
"Social networking sites are meant to get as many users in one place as possible on one platform, and for attackers there's a lot of return-on-investment in going after them," Moyer said, describing the climate as a perfect storm of social engineering and bad programming.
:
