Archive for January 18th, 2012

What does Facebook owe you

Wednesday, January 18th, 2012

These last seven years of Facebook’s domination has radically changed the way of communication between internet users, while it has formed a new culture of online socializing. Along with the whole popularity, many hackers have been lured by the huge amounts of users visiting Facebook who try to take advantage of the “innocence” of most unsuspecting users. Due to this, we happen to see many security issues that have challenged numerous security engineers and researchers. Social networks are, as the word says, social, and this is the exact problem that leads to the exploitation of vulnerabilities that may exist. Of course we are not talking about system vulnerabilities but “human” vulnerabilities which are the most difficult to defeat.
Most social networking users, lack of basic security knowledge and this may create enormous problems. In order to safeguard these users and of course the reputation of the most popular social network, we suggest 5 changes that Facebook should adopt:
HTTPS Browsing Facebook should enforce full HTTPS browsing and not optional as it is at the moment. Two-Factor Authentication
As banks use tokens in order to safeguard e-transactions for their clients, Facebook should adopt e-tokens in order to enhance security.
Secured Apps In order to avoid malicious applications, Facebook should perform analyzed researches in order to check and approve incoming applications, making clear which of them are trusted and which are not.
“Recommended” Privacy Controls Recommended privacy settings should change by default in order to make accounts safer. It is common knowledge that the high majority of the users have never change these settings in order to have a secured account.
Account Deletion The process of account deleting should do exactly what it says – total delete of an account – without making it hard for the users by sending emails to Facebook’s customer support.
These are totally realistic changes that may increase the security for every single Facebook user, which should be adopted by Facebook in order to maintain its high reputation among the world of social networking.
konstantinos Vavousis

Trust-IT Security Intelligence