Social Media

Accessing Facebook from a public computer or Internet cafe can now be done more securely. Moving to enhance online security, Facebook on Tuesday said that it will soon offer users the ability to receive one-time passwords on their mobile phones and that it has already enabled the ability to sign out of Facebook remotely. “We’re launching one-time passwords to make it safer to use public computers in places like hotels, cafes or airports,” said Facebook product manager Jake Brill in a blog post. “If you have any concerns about security of the computer you’re using while accessing Facebook, we can text you a one-time password to use instead of your regular password.” ...

Twitterers are still clogging the micro-blogging service with little messages about the cross-site-scripting problem earlier today. Twitter has announced that the problem has been fixed. A cross-site scripting vulnerability using “onmouseover” was being widely exploited to spread worms and redirect viewers to malicious sites. Story here from The Register.

We have started to see again a large increase in the amount of emails pretending to come from Facebook. There are two types of emails which are being sent in large amounts currently. Both of them use classical types of social engineering techniques. The first type is using the old trick with “the photos”. The final target is a website where SMSes can be sent for “free” (note the quotes). I would like to emphasize again that there is nothing out there for free. Even if you don’t pay for it, those who offer the service (or whatever is given for “free”) do get something in exchange. It might be your telephone number, your email address or something similar which is worth a lot on the Internet. ...

Have you seen a message like this on Facebook? I just got the Dislike button, so now I can dislike all of your dumb posts lol!! If so, don’t click on the link. It’s the latest survey scam spreading virally across Facebook, using the tried-and-tested formula used in the past by other viral scams including “Justin Bieber trying to flirt”, “Student attacked his teacher and nearly killed him”, “the biggest and scariest snake” and the “world’s worst McDonald’s customer”. ...

“What are you doing? “To join or to see who invited you, check the attachment.” Hmmm. That looked interesting. After I clicked on it (in virtual environment), Yahoo renamed the attachment from “Invitation+Card.zip” to “Neutral.gif” and gave a warning: Nice work Yahoo.

A Facebook malware attack is on the loose this weekend, enticing users to click a “Distracting Beach Babes” video on their Facebook Walls. The Wall message reads: “this is hilarious! lol 😛 😛 😛 Distracting Beach Babes [HQ] Length: 5:32″. If you see this video on Facebook today, do not click the link: Doing so, and downloading a linked file, will result in malware being installed on your computer. ...

A Pakistani court has ordered the authorities to temporarily block Facebook due to a contest that calls for caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. The court order follows a petition by a group called the Islamic Lawyers’ Movement, which complained that the contest was “blasphemous.” A search on Facebook reveals two sites featuring such caricatures: one supporting Kurt Westergaard, the Danish cartoonist who created the caricature of the Prophet, published in Danish newspapers in 2005. ...

The All Facebook blog (not an official Facebook site) is reporting that Facebook’s Public Policy Director, Tim Sparapani has said the company will install privacy settings that are easier to understand and control in the next few weeks. (“Facebook Preparing To Release Simple Privacy Settings” ) The 800-pound gorilla of the social media world has been taking increasing heat recently about its sloppy attitude toward securing users personal information and privacy policy that seems to permit it to do nearly anything with users personal info.. ...

Facebook grew more popular than Myspace just about two years ago, and has been been enjoying steady growth while MySpace flounders trying to reinvent itself. But the recent attention brought to Facebook’s privacy issues -specifically the complaint filed with the US Federal Trade Commission by EPIC pointing out that Facebook data isn’t as private as it once was- has opened a door for MySpace to jam its foot into. The New York Times last week called Facebook’s privacy settings “A bewildering tangle of options,” with 50 settings menus with more than 170 options, and a privacy statement more than 1,200 words longer than the U.S. Constitution. ...

Despite ongoing questions about privacy, Facebook’s new social plugins continue to expand their footprint across the web, with the company announcing on Tuesday that more than 100,000 websites have now deployed them. The plugins –- which allow websites to add Facebook-powered social features without requiring users to log in –- were announced less than a month ago at Facebook’s developer conference, and attracted more than 50,000 publishers in the first week. ...