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Friday 15 May 2009

Social-Networking !


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Social-Networking !
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Although sites like -Facebook & Twitter have a reputation for good Internet security — & identifies scams within hours, & the ripple effects only last for a couple days — at 200 million members & growing the size & popularity of the site has made it the object of increasing attention from hackers & spammers. And it's only going to get worse.In the '90s, hackers & scammers used e-mail & today it's social networking. Although people have been trained not to click on suspicious e-mails they don't seem to use the same caution when presented with a link on Facebook or Twitter. Maybe that's why the number of phishing attacks on these kinds of sites, as opposed to infecting your computer with a virus , has skyrocketed recently, from 4,600 attacks in 2007 to 11,000 in 2008. This year looks like another increase with 6,400 attacks in the first 3 months of this year.
At first glance social networking sites would seem less of a gold mine for criminals since there is no direct financial gain from hacking into a Facebook account. But criminals know that most of us are lazy or forgetful & use the same password on most sites. In early 2008, Facebook noticed a marked increase in the number of scams. "We're the most effective distribution platform on the Internet," says Ryan McGeehan, the company's incidence-response manager. "The level of person-to-person connection doesn't exist anywhere else. As we get bigger, we become a bigger target.
Facebook monitors there users activity & when someone goes from a few posts a week to hundreds of messages within a few minutes, the security team can logically assume that the account has been hacked. They'll notify the user, reset there password & the issue is usually resolved within hours. But when thousands of users are hacked at the same time — & then their friends are hacked, and their friends' friends are also hacked, it can take a few days for Facebook to fix the problem. That is what happened on April 29 and 30, when users found themselves logging in to a website called FBAction.net. Designed to look exactly like Facebook. The doppelgänger took their details & then hacked their friends accounts.

A similar phishing scam got a foothold on the site in January. Last year hackers broke into accounts by convincing people to click on links posted on their profiles. Another common Facebook scam is to hack someone's account and then send messages to friends asking for money .Facebook won't say how many accounts were compromised last week, but a rep notes that the site has never had a scammer hack more than a small fraction of its accounts, adding that the company's security team ` which has over a 100 analysts, engineers & programmers — can handle whatever comes their way. "We're going to be attacked again in the future," says a representative, "& our aim is to be prepared when it does."

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ArchView

Heres an open source extension for firefox - it lets you open files your about to download,or view them without downloading them at all !

ArchView is an extension of Firefox. It can open archive file online and get the catalog. It also can preview or download files in archive. Currently, it supports ZIP, RAR archives and ISO-9660 CD images. The main feature of ArchView is that it can open an individal file without download the whole archive, since it only fetch the necessary portion. So it's suitable for checking the content of archive before download. ArchView can support HTTP and FTP protocols. It can also handle local files via file: protocol.

What ArchView Is Not

ArchView isn't intended to replace 7-Zip, WinZip or WinRAR. It lacks some of the features it can't add or delete files in the archive. ArchView doesn't support compression & has no plan to realize it. ArchView is a companion to those tools- as they are designed to handle local files. Almost none of them can deal with archive files on the internet or an FTP server. ArchView can work together with Firefox.If you want more info. on this add on

http://archview.sourceforge.net/

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