250GB of user Data steal in Facebook invasion

Programs designed to resemble humans infiltrated Facebook recently and made off with 250 gigabytes of personal information belonging to thousands of the social network's users, researchers said in an academic paper released today
The eight-week study was designed to evaluate how vulnerable online social networks are to large-scale infiltrations by programs designed to mimic real users, researchers from the University of British Columbia.
 During the next six weeks, the bots sent connection requests to 3,517 Facebook friends of users who accepted requests during the first phase. Of those, 2,079 users, or about 59 percent, accepted the second round of requests. The increase was due to what researchers called the "triadic closure principle," which predicts that if two users had a mutual friend in common, they were three times more likely to become connected.From the OSN [online social network] side, we show that it is not difficult to fully automate the overall operation of an SbN [socialbot network], including accounts creation, researchers wrote in the paper, which is scheduled to be presented at next month's Annual Computer Security Applications Conference in Orlando, Fla. "From the users' side, we show that most OSN users are not careful enough when accepting connection requests sent by strangers, especially when they have mutual connections..We have numerous systems designed to detect fake accounts and prevent scraping of information," a Facebook representative said. "We are constantly updating these systems to improve their effectiveness and address new kinds of attacks. We'll use the University of British Columbia research as part of that process. In addition, as always, we encourage people to only connect with people they actually know and report any suspicious behavior they observe on the site.