41% happy to hand out personal data to strangers.
Research carried out by
Sophos
has found that 41% of users of hugely popular social networking site
Facebook
risk revealing sensitive personal information to total strangers.
The study involved creating a user on the site under the name ‘Freddi Staur’ (an anagram of ‘ID fraudster’) and contacting 200 randomly selected members of
Facebook
‘s 35-million-strong online community with a ‘friend request’, to which 87 users responded, many of them revealing email addresses, dates of birth, employment information, home addresses and even phone numbers. Several provided complete resumes, while one even revealed his mother’s maiden name. The data thus gained could be invaluable to phishers, identity thieves and other fraudsters.
Sophos
suggests that too many
Facebook
users fail to make use of the security features available, leaving the fairly open default settings unchanged – a
Facebook
spokesperson told the
Wall Street Journal
(in an article available to
WSJ
subscribers
here
) that only 20% of users change the settings from the defaults.
Facebook
also insists that it monitors its users’ activities and regularly shuts down accounts which appear to be abusing the system to gather potentially sensitive data, including it seems the fake ‘Freddi Staur’ user.
Details of the study from
Sophos
are
here
, and a guide to securing
Facebook
accounts is also provided,
here
.
Posted on 14 August 2007 by
Virus Bulletin
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