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A study of web traffic from enterprises in the first quarter of this year has shown that YouTube videos used 10 percent of bandwidth – more than any other site. Facebook traffic used 4.5 percent, Windows update 3.3, Yahoo!’s image server Yimg 2.7 and Google searches 2.5 percent. The study, by the Hong Kong-based security firm Network Box, analyzed traffic to and from 13 billion URLs. The study also analyzed the number of hits: ...

Next week, FarmVille players will have the ability to grow peanuts, thanks to ad agency Saatchi and Saatchi and an Israeli candy brand. We’re told this is the first time a FarmVille crop has been directly linked to a brand. Saatchi Interactive in Tel Aviv is working on a rollout campaign for Elite Taami Nutz, a peanut-filled variant of a popular Israeli chocolate bar. The new crop will roll out with a simultaneous farm design competition on April 14. The peanuts cost 20 credits to buy, sell for 78 credits and can be harvested in 16 hours. ...

Oh dear — looks like it’s time to add FarmVille to the list of internet addiction scares after a 12-year-old UK boy has amassed £905 in FarmVille debt. About £288 of that came from the boy’s own savings, while £625 was billed to his horrified mother’s credit card. The debt — which is equivalent to about $1400 USD — was racked up in all of about two weeks’ worth of gameplay. In the popular casual Facebook game, players can spend real money to accrue virtual currency and items. It’s a business that’s booming enough to garner the game’s developer Zynga an estimated valuation as high as $5 billion. ...

Farmville has been launch in June 2009 and after month it has been rated at #8 in Top 25 Facebook Games. Farmville has become the most popular games on Facebook. It has been rank at #1 Facebook Game on August 2009 up until now. Farmville users can’t get enough of farming. They make impressive hay bales art farm just like the Image below. Fake AV gang launches its attack to the Farmville users by poisoning Yahoo and Google search results using the following keywords (see Image 1): ...

There are a number of Toolbars out there in the wild with a nasty sting in the tail for anybody using them to login to Facebook. We’ve seen two of these so far; it’s possible there are more. Promoted as toolbars that allow you to cheat at popular Zynga games such as Mafia Wars, they appear to be normal at first glance with a collection of links to various websites and other features common to this type of program. ...

The Inquirer security news site were reporting that the 25-year-old arrested by French police for hacking a Twitter data base and accessing U.S. President Barak Obama’s account guessed the admin’s password. The unemployed man, who went by the handle “Hacker Croll.” is not a genius, the news site concluded. “Apparently it was a doddle to do. He simply guessed people’s passwords by working them out from information on their blogs or online pages they had created about themselves,” it said. ...

Lots of little newsworthy updates recently . . . they’ve been well-covered elsewhere, but we wanted to make sure our readers saw them as well. Russia: Safe Haven no more? One of the constant complaints that we hear is “the criminal is probably in Russia”, as an excuse for why a case is not worth investigating. Back on November 11, 2009, we posted a story The $9 Million World-wide Bank Robbery, where VIKTOR PLESHCHUK, 28, of St. Petersburg, Russia; SERGEI TŠURIKOV, 25, of Tallinn, Estonia; and OLEG COVELIN, 28, of Chişinău, Moldova were charged with leading the robbery, which actually occurred in 2008. This week the Financial Times has revealed that Viktor Pleshchuk was arrested by the FSB. Their story leads with: ...

Facebook is, by its nature, a social experience. But as the undisputed king of social networking expands ways for its users to interact, it’s raising more questions about how much of their information is made available to people they don’t know. In some cases, users may not even realize it’s happening. One example is the hundreds of thousands of developers approved by Facebook to create games, quizzes and other applications. Some of those developers are able to access basic information about users after a Facebook friend has started using their application. ...

New Scientist is reporting that a massive database culled from the public profiles of 210 million Facebook users has been destroyed before its anticipated — and controversial — release to researchers. Pete Warden, a former Apple engineer, reluctantly deleted the data after Facebook threatened legal action, saying he could not afford to fight a lawsuit. He said Facebook was not aware that such information was available and that the flaw is being patched. ...

Whole Foods, a popular health and organic grocery chain, is the subject of a new Facebook scam that phishes for users’ credit and other personal information. A deluge of fraudulent Facebook Pages are popping up that promise a limited number of users Whole Foods gift cards. These Pages are accruing thousands of fans and siphoning off sensitive and lucrative data. The groups offering Whole Foods gift cards are in no way affiliated with the supermarket; rather, con artists are using the Pages to uncover important personal and financial information from users via a bogus credit assessment. After giving the requested information, users watch their computers crash as their identities are completely exposed. ...