The SparK

While Facebook (widely leader) and his colleagues annoy honest people trying to manage groups and pages without too much bother for some people and even by ensuring morality, they do not provide solutions to real problems cons …

So says a study released by BitDefender, a company specializing in security solutions.

Social networks: beware of false friends!

(…) BitDefender [publish] a study that the playing of games on social networks increased the number of spam and phishing attempts over 50%.

BitDefender explains that hackers exploit the social gaming trend of creating fake profiles and using robots to send spam to groups of players. Thus, unlike traditional spam techniques, false profiles associated with social games are added voluntarily by users who do not pay attention and who were seeking to expand the gaming community around their favorite games. The removal of these false accounts is then almost impossible to do automatically, is that the action taken by spammers is not objectionable in itself. The study also reveals that false accounts with the most success are those who best emulate the real profiles with extensive information and pictures of their alleged “user.”

To get to the bottom, BitDefender researchers have created three fake profiles: one without pictures and with a minimum of information, the other with a picture and some information and the third with a wealth of information and photos. The three profiles have joined groups on general topics. An hour later, the circle of friends of each profile was expanded with 23 connections for the first profile, 47 for second and 53 for third. Then, the same experiment was done on groups of social games.

Result: the number of users wishing to add these strangers to their friends list then increased considerably. In 24 hours, 85 operators have thus accepted the request from the first profile, 108 the second and 111 the third.

“Users are more inclined to accept spammers in their list of friends in a social network than any other online communication environment” PETRE says George, Head of the study of threats from BitDefender. “This acceptance ‘blind’ allows spammers and hackers using social engineering techniques to get closer to users so much more efficient than any other type of e-mail or scam domains. In addition, we found that in the context of social networks, users can more easily be trapped for spammers add to their profile. Facebook is the social network most in vogue at the moment is also the system most vulnerable to such attacks. To not participate in the development of these threats, we recommend that fans of course social games to exercise the utmost vigilance if they wish to expand their circle of friends. “