NESTA Crime Online - University of Brighton Repository

ecruitment marketplace for cybercriminals and (3) they contain vast amounts of
personal information that can be used for identity theft. 76
MySpace or Cybercrookspace?
Cybercrooks are increasingly using MySpace and Facebook to recruit people, network,
spread malware, and steal personal information. Cybercriminals are exploiting the
popularity of social networking sites to steal identities or craft more personalised fraud
attempts. Facebook, which has exploded in popularity in the UK in recent months, allows
people to post detailed, personal information about themselves from their date of birth
to the schools they attended – precisely the information that banks ask for as security
questions. Someone’s mother’s maiden name, or place of birth, is now so easily
available to become almost redundant. Tim Pie, at HSBC, said: “There will come a time
when that sort of identification will become a thing of the past.”
In August 2008 Kaspersky Lab discovered two worms that had been specifically
designed to target MySpace and Facebook. Also, a federal judge has ordered a Canadian
man to pay Facebook $873 million for blasting members of the social networking site
with spam.
Sources: Dan Kaplan, (2008), articles in http://www.scmagazineus.com/.; Harry Wallop,
Consumer Affairs Correspondent (4 th July 2007), Fears over Facebook identity fraud, The
Telegraph.
76 Facebook adopted open innovation in 2007 by releasing Facebook Platform for application developers. Since
then, thousands of third-party applications on Facebook have become available, which allows the developers to
access information from those Facebook users that install these applications. Tightening security to protect the
privacy and personal information from Facebook users would contradict the principles of open innovation,
based on sharing information.
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