Turning social networks against users

By Erica Naone in Technology Review 15 September (in email alert 19 September)

Applications built on social networks may be the ideal way to distribute malicious code.
Ever since Facebook opened its doors to third-party applications a year and a half ago, millions of users have employed miniature applications to play games, share movie and song recommendations, and even "zombie-bite" their friends. But as the popularity of third-party applications has grown, computer-security researchers have also begun worrying about ways that social-networking applications could be misused.
The same thing that makes social networking such an effective way to distribute applications – deep access to a user's networks of friends and acquaintances – could perhaps make it an ideal way to distribute malicious code.

Read the full article which has, as all Technology Review items do, loads of external links. I've not checked them all but one can normally assume that Massachusetts Institute of Technology doesn't link to malware (although ads are a different matter).

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