More evidence that cyber criminals are using personal information from social networking sites to create socially engineered attacks was recently disclosed when VeriSign iDefense reported a cyber crook was trying to sell 1.5 million Facebook accounts on an electric fraud Web forum. In the article, “1.5 Million Facebook Accounts for Sale in Web Forum, VeriSign Reports,” social networking credentials are gaining value in the cyber-underworld. According to Rick Howard, director of cyber-intelligence at iDefense, the more Facebook friends an account has, the more valuable the credential.

“Once you have the name and address and other profile-type information from a social networking site, you can use it to corroborate your way into debit card accounts and bank accounts through social engineering. You could also use these accounts as a platform to distribute malware through the friend system. In the end, a stolen Facebook credential is like a skeleton key to social engineering attacks against every family member, friend or acquaintance of the person whose Facebook account has been compromised. The more friends the user has, the more valuable the credential.”

Online criminals often use personal data they’ve swiped from popular social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter to commit fraud against other industries. That’s where iovation comes in. Our shared database of device reputations exposes incidents where the same unique devices are attempting to commit fraud across multiple verticals. In fact, 16.57% of the overall fraud and abusive activities that we help our customers stop on a daily basis are computers attempting to perpetrate fraud across multiple industries.

This, along with an alarming industry report that shows 92% of customer-facing websites still leave their online visitors open to online fraud techniques such as malware, phishing and forged emails, underscores the need for companies to share global fraud intelligence stored in a central repository to stop fraudsters.

Tags: cyber crime, device reputations, Facebook, global fraud intelligence, social networking sites

This entry was posted on Friday, May 7th, 2010 at 9:44 am and is filed under Online Communities, Online Retail. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.