As Facebook begins to steal market share away from email as a primary mode of online communication--links that used to be emailed are now shared on walls--malicious programmers have updated their tactics to reflect the shift. Particularly abusive in the past few days have been links offering users the chance to see pictures or videos of bin Laden's death. Unwary Facebookers click on the link, are invited to allow an app access to their information, and boom: the phony link is rebroadcast out to all their friends.
This chain of events should not be unfamiliar. Email experienced the same problems in its early years. While I admittedly was a bit too young in the early-to-mid 90s to fully understand the concept of email spams and viruses at the time, the parallels seem obvious. One of two things must happen for the tide of spam and viruses to stop:
- Facebook users have to get smarter and stop clicking the links.
- Facebook must put filters into place capable of stopping these messages before they get to users walls.
The more and more I think about it, the more I become convinced that social networking, at some point, might replace personal email. The more popular Facebook gets, the more incentive there will be for hackers to program malicious viruses to steal information and compromise security. Unless Facebook can stay one step ahead of them and begin protecting users' news feeds from these sorts of attacks, they may one day find themselves in the same category as AOL: forgotten tech giant.
and when you said i couldn't save you enough, i started giving you up, i started giving you up
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