Researchers illustrate the ease of stealing information from Facebook

IdentityTheft — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 16:08:00 GMT

Researchers from the University of British Columbia released a paper recently entitled "The Socialbot Network: When Bots Socialise for Fame and Money." The paper makes the claim that Facebook's in-built security systems are not effective at stopping automated identity theft. The researchers ran a large-scale infiltration of the network using socialbots.

During the test, researchers said they were able to collect private data from thousands of Facebook users and infiltrate their friend networks using socialbots. A socialbot is automated software that can control a social networking account and perform basic functions like posting messages and friend requests. The bots pass themselves off as being a human being rather than computer code.

Facebook does have in place precautions that are supposed to avoid the automated creation of accounts, specifically the use of CAPTCHAs, but researchers accounted for that, saying they used online services to break them. They also created status updates using an API provided by a website that provided random quotes automatically.

The scary part is that socialbots can be used to harvest personal information like e-mail addresses and phone numbers. One person can use several socialbots and control the information and social profiles of several people.

The process went like this: A Facebook user gets a friend request from someone and accepts it. If the bot was already listed as a "friend of a friend," the bot was accepted much more quickly at new friend requests. Once the connection is made, researchers were able to gather personal information not only from the new "friend," but also from that user's network of friends.

Clearly, this shows the importance of being careful about who you accept as friends on social networks. It also shows that Facebook has a long way to go when it comes to its in-built security systems, which are supposed to protect users from this type of thing. It's an alarming thing, said researchers, how easy it is to automate identity theft on Facebook.

ID theft : identity fraud, identity theft on Facebook, identity theft

Researchers illustrate the ease of stealing information from Facebook