Hey would you normally hand over your private information such as names, addresses, birth dates, phone numbers, email address and other personal information to strangers? Of course not. But wait, you may already have!!! Facebook is the world’s largest online social network that boost 250,000 new members each day, and 60,80,100 millions of users that’s growing by days. Chances are we enjoyed the site because we can find out what’s happening to our friends and family.

If you read part 1 of the article you’ll know how easy it is to gain access to other people’s profile. Well, here’s another simple exploits…
So you think have your little trusted inner-circle, but guess what? Ask yourself the question, so who’s seeing this? “My friends of course,” you said. Friends? What kind of friends? Real friends of course!!! You mean real real real friends? Friends you see every week, or friends that you simply know how to spell their names?

  • Firstly, Facebook blurs the distinction between our personal and private lives: work colleagues are all bundled in with family, old school friends, the people you socialise with face-to-face, and people with whom you share a hobby, sport or interest.
  • Secondly, alot of people are also trying to boost the number of friends they have by adding as much friends to their network as possible. People like to boost and say “Hey I have 300 friends in my profile, how many friends do you have?”. What this does is that it invites potential fraudsters because by knowing all these information about you, it can be extracted for unintended purposes that could be harmful to you. Your inner-circle has been compromised by people that rarely know you.
  • Thirdly, alot of people have so few friends that they seek connections online. Unsuspectingly, they’d accept any friends request even if they are plain strangers.

Trick 1: So the trick is simple, create a profile user with the cutest thing you’ve ever seen and a name to fit. Send out invitations to the targets…and according to statistics, 40% of the invites will be accepted unquestioned.

Trick 2: Knowing that not everyone will fall for this. You may need to add a message such as “Hey, I got a new facebook account. Im going to delete the old one, so please accept this to add my new profile”. With a bit more persuasion, the unsuspecting user may fall for it.

Why is this so easy? As per Sophos Security Firm’s experiment, they set up a fake profile under the name of ‘Freddi Staur’ (an anagram of ID fraudster). They then sent out 200 random friend requests to users around the globe. Over two in five accepted and leaked personal information to the inanimate green desk ornament.

Little Green Frog

What they found:

  • 87 of the 200 Facebook users contacted responded to Freddi, with 82 leaking personal information (41% of those approached)
  • 72% of respondents divulged one or more email address
  • 84% of respondents listed their full date of birth
  • 87% of respondents provided details about their education or workplace
  • 78% of respondents listed their current address or location
  • 23% of respondents listed their current phone number
  • 26% of respondents provided their instant messaging screenname

In the majority of cases, Freddi was able to gain access to respondents’ photos of family and friends, information about likes/dislikes, hobbies, employer details and other personal facts. In addition, many users also disclosed the names of their spouses or partners, several included their complete résumés, while one user even divulged his mother’s maiden name – information often requested by websites in order to retrieve account details.

How do you deal with this?

  1. Never accept friend request from strangers. Always verify their identity either online or offline.
  2. Don’t fall for the ‘collect as many friends as possible’ game that amateur Facebook users often get into.
  3. Review your full list of friends once in a while (I know it’s daunting and who’s got the time anyway?) to ensure you didn’t add someone by mistake. There’s also a big chance that someone on your list was special to you for a particular moment and that’s no longer the case. You should not hesitate to remove him/her from your list.
  4. Adopt a rule for yourself of considering who is really your ‘friend’. For example for me, I have received numerous invitation from co-workers or ex-coworkers. I have decided that I’ll use Facebook only with people I considered friends and not co-workers or people I’ll never meet again.
  5. Change your privacy setting especially in the Privacy > Search section. This screen defines what they can see when people wants to add you as a friend. If you’re super-paranoid, you are likely only allow friends on search visibility. But I can tell you this also blocks old school friends from ever finding you. And so my approach to this is to allow Everyone to be able to search and get to you. However, what you need to control is how much they see.

facebookhack109.jpg

I’d suggest you turn off ‘See Your Picture‘ and ‘View Your Friend List‘. What this does is that it’ll prevent what I described in Part 1 of the article from happening. That is, no one can really use your friends as baits to get you to accept their friend request, nor would they be able to use your picture to lure others (i.e. you as the friend to bait others).

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