Sep 26, 2010
Want to socialize and bank safely online? Be prepared to be your own best bodyguard.
With self-replicating spamming wormsproliferating on popular social sites, officials at Facebook and Twitter say they've come to rely heavily on users to help them police postings. This follows a trend set by the banking industry, which now relies heavily on customers to keep themselves safe while banking online.
"To combat these threats, we need people to practice safe behavior online," says Facebook spokesman Simon Axten. "We advise people to be suspicious of anything that looks or feels strange – whether it's an unfamiliar link in a message from a friend who hasn't contacted you in a while, or a promise of something valuable if you take a certain action or provide personal information."
Twitter spokesman Sean Garrett warns users to be particularly wary of Tweets that lead you to services promising to gain you a ton of followers quickly. Garrett says you should avoid any pitches that asks you for a payment or requires you to follow a list of other users in order to participate. He highly recommends studying Twitter's extensive usage rules and best practices guidelines listed here.
Some cybersecurity and privacy experts believe Twitter and Facebook could be doing a lot more to make their respective services safer. "Twitter and Facebook, with their huge subscriber bases, appear to introduce new features and updates with out much beta testing," says Andy Hayter, a manager at tech security testing firm ICSA Labs. "Their reliance on releasing new features to the entire community, to be vetted in real time, has led to many security holes and privacy loopholes."
By Byron Acohido
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