Researchers steal Facebook user data with army of socialbots

Researchers at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver used a small array of scripts programmed to pass themselves off as real people to steal 250GB of personal information from Facebook users in just eight weeks.
They created 102 "socialbots" as part of a study on social network security, which included a name and picture of a fictitious person, and used programming interfaces from iheartquotes.com to embed pseudo-random quotes into status updates. They also used Facebook interfaces to send friend requests to around 5,000 randomly chosen profiles.
In order not to flag fraud detection systems they limited friendship requests to around 25 per day, which within two weeks saw 976, or 19-p... »read more

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