Social notworking sites are hacker heaven

SOCIAL NOTWORKING sites have become a playground for hackers, a top security conference was told this week.

Nathan Hamiel and Shawn Moyer told the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas that hackers loved the fact that users place intimate details of their lives on profile pages and install mini-applications made by strangers.

The problem has been exacerbated by Facebook's policy of opening up its operating platform to let outside developers craft fun software 'widgets'.

Hackers could use such widgets to hide malicious code.

Moyer told AFP that Facebook or MySpace were not so much to blame as dumb users who stick things on their site which give out too much private information or add applications they don't need.

He said that every time someone adds an application they have the trust of a child in whoever wrote the application, and most people don't know who that is.

Software has been crafted that allows punters to steal profile information, swiping people's 'friends', or locking people out of their own My Space pages.

My Space engineers who attended the talk said they had searched the site for the application that Hamiel had written to demonstrate his talk and had it deleted. µ

L'Inq
AFP