In November, I blogged on the fact that Social Networking sites, specifically LinkedIn, could be used in attempts to harvest personal information. A recent story on InformationWeek caught my attention since it relates to a Canadian company and involves an attempt to harvest data from Facebook. As e-mail address harvesting is key to a spam campaign, I feel this is very relevent to the Anti-Spam community. To quote from the article..
Facebook alleges that during the 15 day period between June 1, 2007 and June 15, 2007, the defendants tried to access information on Facebook’s servers over 200,000 times using an automated script that attempted to harvest information from other Facebook users.The alleged information harvesting effort cost Facebook over $5,000, the legal filing claims, noting that the data accessed includes user names, passwords, network affiliations and e-mail addresses.
Facebook originally filed the lawsuit in June of this year against 10 unnamed companies but amended it last week to name three of the individuals and companies as defendants. It’s paramount that Social Networking sites take security seriously if they are to maintain the trust of their userbase.