All posts tagged ‘facebook’

File Under: privacy, Security, Social
Jan
5
2012

Worm Steals 45,000 Facebook Login Credentials, Infects Victims’ Friends

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A worm previously used to commit financial fraud is now stealing Facebook login credentials, compromising at least 45,000 Facebook accounts with the goals of transmitting malicious links to victims’ friends and gaining remote access to corporate networks.

The security company Seculert has been tracking the progress of Ramnit, a worm first discovered in April 2010, and described by Microsoft as “multi-component malware that infects Windows executable files, Microsoft Office files and HTML files” in order to steal “sensitive information such as saved FTP credentials and browser cookies.” Ramnit has previously been used to “bypass two-factor authentication and transaction signing systems, gain remote access to financial institutions, compromise online banking sessions and penetrate several corporate networks,” Seculert says.

Recently, Seculert set up a sinkhole and discovered that 800,000 machines were infected between September and December. Moreover, Seculert found that more than 45,000 Facebook login credentials, mostly in the UK and France, were stolen by a new variant of the worm.

“We suspect that the attackers behind Ramnit are using the stolen credentials to log-in to victims’ Facebook accounts and to transmit malicious links to their friends, thereby magnifying the malware’s spread even further,” Seculert said. “In addition, cybercriminals are taking advantage of the fact that users tend to use the same password in various web-based services (Facebook, Gmail, Corporate SSL VPN, Outlook Web Access, etc.) to gain remote access to corporate networks.”

Facebook fraud, of course, is nothing new. Facebook itself has acknowledged seeing 600,000 compromised logins each day, although that accounts for just 0.06 percent of the one billion Facebook logins each day.

This article originally appeared on Ars Technica, Wired’s sister site for in-depth technology news.

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File Under: Identity, privacy, Social
Sep
23
2011

Facebook Wants Your Past, Present, and Future On Open Graphs and Timelines

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Facebook will soon allow its users to integrate all of their music, media, and lifestyle actions and interactions with their profiles, Mark Zuckerberg announced at Facebook’s f8 conference yesterday. Connecting profiles to services like Spotify will allow users to fill out their own curated “Timeline,” so friends can see each others’ media activities both as individuals and aggregated over their entire network, a move that will explode the amount of content on the site.

The new arrangement is part of two new Facebook initiatives, one of which is the Timeline. Users can fill in their Timelines with both content pulled in from other services — say, an article “liked” on Ars Technica or a game played — as well as “real world” activities like photos or status updates. The real world content can be filtered by date into the timeline, so users can fill in their backstory on the site with everything that happened before Facebook existed: moves to a new city, first words as a baby, or every single relationship breakup pre-2004.

Once in place, the timeline will be the new News Feed, with friends’ updates streaming past. But not everything will make it into the Timeline: small updates, like what music friends are listening to, may be relegated to the Ticker, the integrated online friends/status update bar rolled out Wednesday. Users will be able to choose which activities are significant enough to appear in their timelines.

Zuckerberg also placed emphasis on the new use of verbs in timelines, which will allow people to sort their friends activities in different ways. For instance, with a status update reading “Casey Johnston is watching Veronica Mars for the millionth time,” users will be able to click both “watching” to see what else friends are viewing at the moment, or “Veronica Mars” to see a list of other friends who like Veronica Mars.

These updates will feed into the second new feature, Facebook Open Graph, which collects and ranks the the activities or items that friends are interacting with. Apps that integrate with Facebook will be sorted in Open Graph based on popularity with a user and his or her friends, including Spotify, Hulu, Netflix, Foodspotting, Vevo, and Nike+, among many others. Open Graph is intended to help with app discoverability, showing users what their friends are doing without flooding their feeds every time a friend kills a mobster or plants a new crop of corn.

When Timeline was introduced, Chris Cox, director of product at Facebook, noted that “there is nothing we love to summarize more than time itself,” stating that with the new features it would be possible for users to create months or years in review.

Of course, Facebook’s entire motivation isn’t just for friends to become more intimate with each others’ past and present. Daniel Ek, Spotify CEO, spoke briefly at the conference, and noted that “because our [Spotify's] playlists are social, they [users] are more engaged. And because they are engaged, they are more than twice as likely to pay for music.” For Spotify, which boasted 2 million paying members worldwide as of Wednesday, the exposure to the better part of a billion Facebook members could mean big bucks.

The new completionist Facebook is a significant departure from what Facebook’s most avid competitors, Google+ and Twitter, currently offer on their sites. If Facebook can get users to buy into putting their whole life histories on the site, the amount of content there will explode, and create an investment and representation of self users won’t be likely to abandon. And with more content comes more opportunities to target ads.

The beta for Facebook’s timelines begins today, with availability being rolled out gradually. Neither Zuckerberg nor any of the speakers mentioned a timeline for the new version, but we expect it will be sooner rather than later.

This article originally appeared on Ars Technica, Wired’s sister site for in-depth technology news.

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File Under: Browsers, Security
Nov
29
2010

Secure Firefox With New HTTPS Everywhere Add-on

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Earlier this year, the Firefox add-on Firesheep created quite a controversy by making it easy to capture unencrypted web traffic.

Firesheep sniffs unencrypted cookies sent across open wi-fi networks. That means anyone with Firesheep installed can watch your browsing sessions while you lounge at Starbucks and grab your log-in credentials for Facebook, Twitter or other popular sites. Armed with those credentials, anyone using Firesheep can essentially masquerade as you all over the web, logging in to other social sites, blogs and news sites using your Facebook or Twitter username and password.

None of Firesheep’s mechanisms are new. But Firesheep made sniffing web traffic point-and-click simple — it was suddenly dead easy to do something that used to require a good bit of hacking knowledge.

The best way to protect yourself from Firesheep is simply avoid connecting to unencrypted sites when you’re on an open wi-fi network. That means making sure that you connect over HTTPS rather than HTTP everywhere you surf. But sadly, doing so is complicated and depends on which site you’re trying to connect to.

That’s where the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s HTTPS Everywhere Firefox add-on comes in. The extension makes it easy to ensure you’re connecting to secure sites by rewriting all requests to an HTTPS URL whenever you visit one of the sites it supports.

Of course if the website you’d like to visit doesn’t support HTTPS, there’s nothing the add-on can do, but for many big sites — Twitter, Facebook, Google, PayPal, The New York Times, Bit.ly, Amazon — HTTPS Everywhere automates the process for you.

With HTTPS Everywhere installed, if you type “twitter.com” in the Firefox URL bar, the browser will automatically connect to https://twitter.com rather than http://twitter.com.

That’s a good start, but it won’t completely protect you from anyone sniffing with Firesheep. The latest beta release of HTTPS Everywhere, released over the long weekend, improves the add-on’s protection against Firesheep, but you’ll need to do some extra stuff.

First, head the HTTPS Everywhere preferences (Tools -> Add Ons -> HTTPS Everywhere -> Preferences) and check the “Facebook+” rule. Then install the Adblock Plus extension and use it to block the insecure http:// advertisements and tracking sites that Facebook (and other sites) sometimes include. There are more instructions on the EFF’s site.

Now you can browse Facebook at the coffee shop in relative peace. Certain parts of Facebook may not work properly — some applications can’t use HTTPS, and the chat app won’t work — but at least you aren’t broadcasting your login credentials to anyone who wants to listen. The EFF says it has alerted Facebook to the incompatibilities, and that it’s waiting for Facebook to fix them.

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File Under: Browsers, Social
Nov
7
2010

First Look at RockMelt, a Browser Built For Facebook Freaks

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The rumor mill has been buzzing for months about the imminent arrival of a new “Facebook browser” called RockMelt.

Well, it really does exist, and it’s here. RockMelt is being released as a limited public beta Sunday. Anyone can sign up to test it out, but the release will be throttled so as not to overload the cloud-based components of the app. RockMelt will be doling out download links as quickly as it can manage on a first-come, first-served basis.

The two founders, CEO Eric Vishria and CTO Tim Howes, demonstrated RockMelt to Wired a few days before Sunday’s launch.

It’s based on Chromium, so it inherits Google Chrome’s speed, looks, and basic functionality on both Mac and Windows.

And while its Facebook integration runs deep, RockMelt is not exactly a Facebook browser. It’s a social web browser, allowing you to post links, videos and status updates to both Facebook and Twitter (that’s it for now, but more services will be added later). There are also built-in clients for consuming your Facebook feed and managing multiple Twitter feeds, a chat client, and lightweight RSS reader. It does use your Facebook account to personalize the experience, but its reach is broader than just Facebook.

We’ve seen browsers custom-built for the social web before, most notably Flock, which launched as a MySpaced-up version of Firefox. Mozilla experimented with Ubiquity, an in-browser tool for posting to different social sites and interacting with web services. There are a number of add-ons that can embed social networking dashboards into the browser for you. These tools have grown in popularity as we’ve struggled to manage the ever-increasing flow of links, media and bits shared by our online friends.

So, the idea isn’t original. And RockMelt doesn’t sport a complete re-invention of the browser interface, either. But it is very streamlined, and there are some key elements that people who live and breathe the social web will find intriguing.

Continue Reading “First Look at RockMelt, a Browser Built For Facebook Freaks” »

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File Under: Social, Web Apps
Sep
29
2010

ThinkUp Adds Color, Depth to Your Social Network Stats

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If you’ve ever wanted to archive your social network activity, store in your own database and pull all sorts of interesting visualizations out of it, then the new ThinkUp app is what you’ve been waiting for.

ThinkUp is one part metrics app — tracking which of your posts are most popular, for example — and one part cross-network aggregator. It offers features you won’t find on Twitter or Facebook, like a detailed “conversation view” of exchanges with other users. ThinkUp also acts as a backup for your social network data, pulling it into your own database. It even offers CSV files for creating your own spreadsheets.

Since it archives all of your activity, ThinkUp is an especially useful tool for those of us who like to maintain control over our own data. It takes stuff that would otherwise only live in the various networks’ silos and copies it to a database where we’re the administrator. So if we want to ditch Twitter or Facebook in some distant future where those companies start acting against our best interests, we don’t lose the massive stores of updates, links, photos and, most importantly, friend relationships we’ve already set up. And in the meantime, it lets us have fun with all the data it’s archiving.

Although ThinkUp is still a beta release, we took the code for a spin and found it to be stable enough to be useful. At the moment, it only supports Twitter and Facebook data, but ThinkUp plans to add additional social networks in the future, including LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube and Google Buzz. If you’d like to try out the limited beta, head over to Github and grab the code. You may notice it’s a project published by Gina Trapani, the former Lifehacker editor who is now an independent author, blogger and programmer.

Continue Reading “ThinkUp Adds Color, Depth to Your Social Network Stats” »

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File Under: Social
Sep
17
2010

Diaspora Unveils its Open Social Code

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The developers behind Diaspora, the social network aiming to build an open source Facebook clone, and maybe steal some of the giant’s thunder, have released their first bit of actual code.

The goal behind the Diaspora project is to create a social network that puts users in charge of their own data. As the developers put it, Diaspora aims to be a “privacy-aware, personally controlled, do-it-all open source social network.” Diaspora made headlines earlier this year for raising some $200,000 from online contributors (including Facebook).

The initial code release is considered pre-alpha — in other words, a long way from its end goal — but it’s now available to development community. If you’re a Ruby on Rails expert and you’d like to try hacking away at the project, you can grab the code from GitHub. It’s been made available under the GPLv3 [Update: It's actually the AGPLv3].

At the moment, Diaspora is capable of sharing status messages and photos privately with your friends, finding friends around the web and controlling who see what with something Diaspora calls “Aspects.”

The roadmap to October’s alpha release includes adding Facebook integration, Data Portability support and internationalization. For more details on Diaspora’s goals and timetable, check out the detailed roadmap and wish list. You can also read more about this most recent launch at Epicenter, where Wired reporter Ryan Singel is on the Diaspora beat. If you’ve got strong opinions of what Diaspora needs or doesn’t need, be sure to jump on the mailing list and make yourself heard.

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File Under: APIs, Location, Social
Aug
19
2010

Facebook Opens Up Places in its API

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Less than a full day after launching its new location-sharing feature, Facebook has opened up Places to developers.

Thursday afternoon, developers gained access to users’ check-in data via Facebook’s Graph API. Developers can also access check-in data from locations, like restaurants and businesses, to see who’s checked in there.

As we mentioned in our coverage of Wednesday evening’s launch, the Places data is read only for now. Applications can’t write or search Places data through the API. Those features are only available to Facebook’s launch partners for Places — Gowalla, Foursquare, Yelp and Booyah — while the kinks get ironed out. Everyone will get access to write and search Places data within a few months, according to Facebook.

The documentation for the Graph API has been updated to provide instructions for calling Places.

So sayeth the man page: “Every check-in is associated with a check-in ID that represents an object in the graph. Check-ins are associated with locations represented by Facebook Pages; the location must have a Facebook Page ID, whether the Page was created on Facebook directly or using the Open Graph protocol.”

If you don’t want to join in any of Facebook’s check-in reindeer games, the How-To Wiki has instructions on disabling Places in your account.

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File Under: Location, Social
Aug
19
2010

‘Places’ Turns Facebook Into a Location Sharing Powerhouse

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Facebook has jumped on the location check-in bandwagon with a new feature known as Places. Facebook Places has launched with four partners, all services that already offer check-in services — Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp and Booyah.

If you use Foursquare, Brightkite or other location check-in services there isn’t much to see in Facebook Places. The only real difference is the scale that Facebook brings to the table.

Places is already available to most in the U.S. in their desktop browsers on Thursday. To use Places on your mobile, you’ll either need to download the new Facebook iPhone app (version 3.2, which is available now), or you can head to the Facebook mobile site with a web browser that supports the Geolocation API (basically anything but IE).

To read full coverage of the Places launch announcement on Wednesday night, read Ryan Singel’s report on Wired’s Epicenter blog.

While Facebook isn’t doing much with location that hasn’t already been done at least half a dozen other services, it does of course bring location sharing to Facebook’s massive user base of 500 million people around the world. Eventually, all of them will get access to Places once it rolls out in other countries. In the past that user base hasn’t been very welcoming of new features, especially features that involve privacy changes. While Places will be activated for all accounts, by default your location won’t be broadcast to everyone — just your friends.

To use the new feature, you can actively check in to a location, or you can let your friends check you in to a location without doing anything. While this may ruffle your feathers, if you don’t want people knowing where you are, it’s pretty simple to disable your friends’ ability to check you in, and to just ignore the check-in button.

According to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Places has three goals: helping people share where they are, seeing which of your friends are close by, and seeing what other places of interest are near you.

Continue Reading “‘Places’ Turns Facebook Into a Location Sharing Powerhouse” »

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File Under: UI/UX, Visual Design
Jul
20
2010

Get Free Design Advice From Not Pixel Perfect Yet

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The web is long on opinion, but short on informed, constructive criticism.

Thank goodness then for Not Pixel Perfect Yet, a group of web experts who will critique your website’s design in public for free, offering helpful suggestions and advice on improving your site’s design, readability and usability.

The group is made up of 10 or so Czech web designers who are skilled in graphic design, UI/UX and search optimization.

You submit a link to the group by
e-mail (feedback@divdesign.cz) telling them what areas you’d like them to critique. If your site is chosen, they’ll post a screenshot of your design to their Facebook page. The different members of the group will all chip in and provide comments about your font choices, your use of CSS, the way you use images, your logo — anything you want to improve. They pick one site per week.

All of the discussion happens in the open on Facebook, and since the group is public, anyone can join the group and participate in the discussion. Even better, everyone on the web can view the Not Pixel Perfect Yet critiques, making the group a valuable learning tool for budding web designers or anyone struggling with basic design challenges.

A couple of caveats — first, the designers are all Czech, so the responses are usually written in Czech. But the team members speak English and can comment on your site in English if you ask. For the critiques that are written in Czech, Google Translate does a decent enough job of getting the point across. If you’re using Chrome, the browser will offer to translate the page automatically.

Second, if you just look at the Wall posts, you won’t see much beyond a few sentences about each design. You need to click over to the “Discussions” tab to get to the meatier comments.

Facebook is probably not the best forum for the NPPY mission. The public flow of comments is nice, but you have to be a Facebook member to comment, and the tabbed interface is wonky. Some folks on Twitter are asking the group members to move it somewhere other than Facebook, and NPPY leader Nikol Kokesova says she is considering starting a blog.

You can see a full list of the members at A Digital Moleskine, where blogger Milan Cermak has posted links to NPPY’s Twitter feeds, and where I originally learned about the project. There’s also a NPPY Twitter list you can follow.

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File Under: Social, Web Services
Jun
23
2010

Twitter Now Lets You Automatically Follow Your Facebook Friends

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Twitter is launching some new tools that let you easily add your Facebook friends and your LinkedIn connections to the list of people you follow on the social network. If your friends from Facebook and LinkedIn are on Twitter, you can use the Twitter’s official apps on those social networks to start following them with one click.

This should be a boon to people who are interested in homogenizing their online social experiences, because it lets them follow everyone they know across three of the major social web platforms out there. Of course, some prefer to keep their chocolate and peanut butter separate — they can just ignore these tools and keep on livin’.

The change was announced on the Twitter blog Wednesday afternoon:

Our Facebook app… now shows which of your Facebook friends are on Twitter and lets you follow them instantly and save them to a list. The app also lets you post your Tweets to your Facebook profile and now, to one of your Facebook pages too. With the Tweets application by LinkedIn, you can see which of your LinkedIn connections are on Twitter and follow the ones you choose right from the app. The app also lets you save your LinkedIn connections as a list, post your Tweets to LinkedIn, and add your Twitter account to your LinkedIn profile.

These enhancements to the Facebook and LinkedIn tools should be listed in Twitter’s Find Friends section soon.

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