Web 2.0 hacks on the increase

SOCIAL engineering and Web 2.0 attacks are fast becoming the most serious security threats on the internet, according to global security experts Grisoft, makers of the AVG security products.

“In 2008, Internet users are likely to see more sophisticated attacks as organised cybercriminals step up their efforts to steal digital assets from social networking site users,” Grisoft chief research officer Roger Thompson.

“Social networks are particularly vulnerable because they rely heavily on hyperlinked content, information sharing and the trust of their participants,” Mr Thompson said.

“From the attacks on Facebook and the Major League Baseball Web site to the Alicia Keys’ sites, it’s clear over the past year that incidence of online threats is accelerating.”

Viruses made up about 15 per cent of the threat landscape in 2007, consistent with Grisoft predictions at the end of 2006. But it was phishing scams, backdoor worms, trojans, keyloggers, spyware, adware and other web-based exploits that comprised the majority of threats, the company said.

Mr Thompson said web exploits and web-based social engineering attacks will be among the biggest security threats to users this year.

“Viruses will continue to be a threat, but we’ll also see an explosion of exploits through social engineering and Web 2.0 attacks in 2008,” he said.

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Li Ka-shing buys Facebook stake

HONGKONG billionaire tycoon Li Ka-shing, Asia’s richest man, has acquired a 0.4 per cent sliver of equity in the social networking site Facebook for a reported US$60 million (A$68.1 million).

Wire reports say the investment was made through the Li Ka-shing Foundation, and did not involve his flagship companies Cheung Kong or Hutchison Whampoa.

79-year-old Mr Li is a much-loved business superstar in Hongkong, a genuine rags-to-riches success in the former British colony.

The investment follows a series of high-profile stakes taken in Facebook in recent months. In October, Microsoft paid UA$240 million (A$272.5 million) for a 1.6 per cent chunk of Facebook.

Forbes magazine puts Mr Li’s personal fortune at about US$23 billion, making him the ninth wealthiest man in the world.

Mr Li and Microsoft’s investments value the privately-held Facebook at US$15 billion.

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Facebook buried in privacy complaints

FACEBOOK has been forced to overhaul its new advertising system following an avalanche of privacy complaints and bad press about the company’s lack of respect for its users.

The advertising system, called ‘Beacon’, was introduced less than two weeks ago and sought to share what online purchases its users had made with their friend network.

While Beacon displayed an “opt out” button when a user was making a purchase, large numbers of Facebook users were incensed. Others complained the ‘Opt Out’ feature was itself offensive, but were more bitter that the ‘Opt Out’ button was so well hidden.

Within nine days more than 50,000 users joined a “Facebook, Stop Invading My Privacy” group on Facebook itself, and signed a petition complaining about the intrusion.

Facebook has now announced adjustments under which users will have to the give explicit consent in the form of an ‘Opt In’ regime before any of their information is shared.

More than 40 web sites had embedded Beacon into their pages in order to track the transactions of Facebook users.

The privacy advocacy group MoveOn.org, which organised the petition campaign, welcomed the changes.

“If Facebook changes their policy so that no private purchases made on other websites are displayed publicly on Facebook without a user's explicit permission, that would be a huge step in the right direction – and would say a lot about the ability of everyday Internet users to band together to make a difference,” MoveOn.org Civic Action organiser Adam Green said.

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Facebook enrages privacy groups

SOCIAL networking phenomena Facebook is under fire from privacy groups over an advertising scheme that publishes the online purchasing habits of its users without their permission.

And a group of privacy advocates are so hot under the collar about it that they are using the networking capabilities of Facebook to organise opposition to the policy.

The group MoveOn.Org has established a Facebook group aimed at generating petition signatories against the policy. Just days old, it now has nearly 9,000 members.

The group highlights the example of Matt, from New York, who found out what his girlfriend was planning to give him for Christmas.

“Why? Because a new Facebook feature automatically shares books, movies, or gifts you buy online with everyone you know on Facebook,” the group says. “Without your consent, it pops up in your News Feed – a huge invasion of privacy.”

The group encourages companies to “get word-of-mouth promotion” for their business to “millions” of users.

The concerns are related to a free tool called Beacon, that businesses are can embed in their sites. When a Facebook user purchases something from that site, it is published on their news feed.

The aim of Beacon is to promote sales through the electronic word-of-mouth provided by social networking. If someone sees their friends making a purchase, they may be encouraged to make the purchase themselves.

Beacon is an opt-out system. When a purchase is made, a small opt-out icon appears at the top of the screen that reportedly disappears after about 20 seconds.

The privacy groups complain that not only is the icon easily missed, but that the scheme should be opt-IN, not opt-out.

Though Facebook built a reputation for strong privacy in its early days, that reputation has taken a battering more recently. When the news-feed was introduced in 2005, users were outraged until the company changed its policies and allowed the feed to be turned off.

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Pacific Internet launches ‘clean feed’

ASIA Pacific services provider Pacific Internet has launched a business grade “clean feed” content filtering system that restricts employee access to web sites that pose a security or productivity risk.

The service, launched in partnership with MailGuard and called PacNet CleanWeb, is tailored for the business and government markets.

Pacific Internet senior vice-president Dennis Muscat said the company had previously partnered with MailGuard to launch its PacNet CleanMail service a year ago.

“We’re aware of the vulnerability many businesses face with staff increasingly accessing the web for social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace,” Mr Muscat said.

“This is a threat to organisations both from a security and a productivity perspective.”

CleanWeb helps manage staff productivity and protect the organisation from malicious attacks via the web, as well as potential litigation due to web browsing abuse.

PacNet CleanWeb provides management, control and reporting of the internet web browsing resource in organisations. The service protects networks and systems against web-based threats.

“PacNet CleanWeb gives businesses the opportunity to manage what their users are actually doing,” Mr Muscat said.

“Administrators simply use the console to manage access to the web by user, file types, key words and sites by individual, group or company wide rules as required.”

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Facebook sells users to corporates

WILDLY popular social network Facebook is to test the loyalty of its 50-million-strong user base, unveiling a new advertising system that targets its users based on their personal preferences.

The company is also announced plans to allow corporations to launch dedicated brand pages on the service, saying it had already signed deals with dozens of companies, including Coca-Cola, Blockbuster and eBay.

Facebook Ads would allow marketers to become “part of the conversation,” Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg told a conference in New York.

The highlight of the system is that “users can now learn about new businesses, brands and products through the trusted referrals of their friends,” the company said.

The Facebook ad system was expected, but its invasiveness has surprised some users. Groups have already appeared on the service protesting the use of personal information by the system.

Facebook’s corporate blog said the Facebook Ads system improved the service for its users. It promised its pages would remain clean-looking, and that users would not see any more advertisments than they see now.

The company also said the service would allow its users to keep in closer contact with the brands they feel “passionate” about.

Mr Zuckerberg said the social network’s role in advertising was becoming increasingly powerful.

“Social actions are powerful because they act as trusted referrals and reinforce the fact that people influence people,” said Mr Zuckerberg said.

“It’s no longer just about messages that are broadcasted out by companies, but increasingly about information that is shared between friends. So we set out to use these social actions to build a new kind of ad system,” he said.

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Users take Facebook addiction to work

IT security and control firm Sophos has revealed the results of a new survey examining the potential productivity implications for businesses that allow their employees to access Facebook during office hours.

Sophos polled 500 Facebook users to find out how often they accessed or checked the popular social networking site from work and found that while 37.2 per cent only visited the site once or twice a day, eight per cent admitted using it up to ten times a day, and an astonishing 14.8 per cent, about one in seven, confessed to being logged onto Facebook almost permanently during their working day.

About 40 per cent of respondents said they never accessed Facebook from work, only using the social networking phenomena from home.

“The results show that more than one fifth of these Facebook users are actually Facebook abusers,” said Sophos senior technology consultant Graham Cluley.

“They're seriously struggling to tear themselves away from the website when they should be concentrating on their job,” he said.

"Several trade unions have spoken out in the site's defence, suggesting that employers should put more trust in their workforce, and clearly the majority of people are using the site in moderation. The problem is that a 20 percent addiction rate equates to an awful lot of loafing, while there's also the likelihood that the abusers could ruin it for the other rule-abiding users.”

According to Sophos, the survey results add weight to growing fears that sites such as Facebook are having a hugely detrimental impact on business productivity. Employment law firm Peninsula recently estimated that 233 million hours are lost every month in the UK alone as a result of employees using social networking sites.

"Many companies are now aware that Facebook brings with it a series of security concerns, particularly the risk of employees inadvertently revealing sensitive or confidential information to the wider world,” Mr Cluley said.

“When combined with the threat of an accompanying productivity slump, they may well decide that social-networking at work is simply more trouble than it's worth.”

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Google draws in MySpace into fold

GOOGLE has joined forces with News Corporation unit MySpace to launch OpenSocial, a set of common APIs for building applications for social networking sites.

The OpenSocial initiative effectively makes Google a clearinghouse for social networking applications.

Google, along with MySpace and others in the social networking space, hope the intitiative will put the brakes on the phenomenal growth of competitor Facebook, which opened its service to third-party developers five months ago.

In following the Facebook lead, MySpace says the announcement underscores the company’s “commitment to supporting standards that foster innovation.”

“Our partnership with Google allows developers to gain massive distribution without unnecessary specialized development for every platform,” MySpace chief executive and co-founder Chris DeWolfe said.

“This is about helping the start-up spend more time building a great product rather than rebuilding it for every social network,” he said.

Global members of the OpenSocial community include Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.

The companies hope the platform will attract third-party developers to their sites.

“As the most trafficked website in the country and the most popular social network in the world, MySpace is one of the leading forces in the global social Web,” said Google chairman and chief executive Eric Schmidt.

“We’re thrilled to grow our strategic relationship with MySpace by joining forces on this important initiative.”

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Microsoft snares Facebook deal, expands advertising

MICROSOFT has scored a rare win over rival Google, snaring a small equity slice of the Facebook service in a US$240 million deal (A$263 million) that values the social networking phenomena at US$15 billion.

The deal gives Microsoft a tiny 1.6 per cent holding in Facebook.

More importantly, however, an expanded strategic alliance signed between the companies as part of the equity deal makes Microsoft the exclusive third-party advertising partner to Facebook.

Microsoft will also begin selling advertising for Facebook internationally on an exclusive basis, in addition to the United States.

“We are pleased to take our Microsoft partnership to the next level,” Facebook chief revenue officer Owen Van Natta said.

“We think this expanded relationship will allow Facebook to continue to innovate and grow as a technology leader and major player in social computing, as well as bring relevant advertising to nearly 50 million active users of Facebook.”

Microsoft Platforms & Services Division president Kevin Johnson said the two companies had partnered well together in the past year, and extending advertising opportunities would benefit both companies, as well as their collective users and advertisers.

“The opportunity to further collaborate as advertising partners is a big reason we have decided to take an equity stake, and is a strong statement of our confidence in the long-term economics of this partnership,” Mr Johnson said.

With about 50 million users worldwide, Facebook is one of the most trafficked web sites in the world, registering 250,000 new users every day – of which 60 per cent are outside the US.

In August last year, the companies announced a US-only strategic alliance that named Microsoft the exclusive provider of standard banner advertising on Facebook using Microsoft’s digital advertising solutions and the Microsoft adCenter platform.

In early 2007, the terms were extended to 2011. This arrangement now applies globally to all advertising.

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Asia-Pacific Internet survey released

US-BASED internet metrix firm comScore has released the first comprehensive review of Net usage in the Asia-Pacific region, making some surprising – and not-so-surprising – discoveries.

The comScore World Metrix numbers reveal that the Asia-Pacific makes up fully one-third of all internet users. But with internet penetration rates varying from 65 per cent (South Korea) to three per cent (India), there remains enormous growth potential.

The region is characterised by the vast differences between its many country markets.

While South Korea boasts the highest rate of internet usage (from home or work locations among users aged 15 or older), Australia is second with 62 per cent penetration, New Zealand third (60 per cent) and Hong Kong fourth (59 per cent).

There is still a lot of room for growth. The average person in the Asia-Pacific region visited the internet on 13.8 days in the month and spent 20.2 hours viewing 2,171 pages. This compares to the global averages of 17.1 usage days per month, 25.2 hours per month, and 2,519 pages per month, indicating that the Asia-Pacific region’s PC-based Internet usage is somewhat lower than the rest of the world.

Yahoo sites are the most popular in the region, though in Australia Yahoo sites are ranked third behind Microsoft and Google.

Meanwhile, comScore has also found that MySpace is starting to lose ground to FaceBook in the US as the most popular social networking service among teenagers.

Though MySpace is still the leader over FaceBook overall, comScore says in the US visitors to MySpace under the age of 18 dropped 30 per cent in the past year while FaceBook visitors surged 250 per cent.

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Facebook opens a new social page

SOCIAL networking comer Facebook has opened its platform to other application developers with the aim of making the service a kind of operating system for the new Web 2.0 world.

Facebook’s 23-year-old founder Mark Zuckerberg said the company has set in place programs to encourage third-party developers to build applications that tightly integrate with the platform.

“Until now, social networks have been closed platforms.Today, we’re going to end that,” Mr Zuckerberg told an audience of more than 750 developers and partners.

“With this evolution of Facebook Platform, any developer worldwide can build full social applications on top of the social graph, inside of Facebook.”

The keynote opened the Facebook f8 event, named to reflect the developer hackathon that ends 8 hours after the address during which new applications will be created for Facebook.

This week, Facebook Platform launched with more than 65 developer partners and 85 applications and with the introduction of an example application called Video.

E-commerce giant Amazon.com is the highest profile of the third-party firms committed to using Facebook Platform to deliver applications. Amazon will next week launch an application that lets Facebook members publish book reviews on their profile page.

Mr Zuckerberg detailed how any developer can build an application that is as integrated into the site’s information flow and connections of relationships as Facebook’s own applications.

Facebook users decide which applications to add and can control their order and appearance within their profiles, all with the familiar Facebook design. Users can always remove applications, including those built by Facebook, and will have their privacy controls maintained across applications.

Facebook introduced a new markup language, Facebook Markup, which along with its previously released APIs allows developers to build applications fully integrated into the site.

Facebook Markup includes features, such as dynamic information tags, conditional privacy tags, image caching and Flash. Developers can build anything they want in full, unlimited application pages on Facebook, called the “canvas pages,” and applications also can have a box in users’ profiles and navigation.

The Facebook site is now the sixth most trafficked internet destination in the US, and is second only to News Corporation’s MySpace as the world’s largest social networking site.

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