The day when Facebook did have more than 500,000,000 active users caused some social network skeptics to think again. But not only researchers, investors, marketers are observing this unfolding universe. There is so much “social capital” bound in social networks now that hackers of the evil kind start thinking about the treasure.
New Class of Malware Will Steal Behavioral Patterns (Technology Review)
… Patterns of contact can also reveal how people are linked, whether they are in a relationship for example, whether they are students or executives, or whether they prefer celebrity gossip to tech news.
This information would allow a determined attacker to build a remarkably detailed picture of the lifestyle of any individual, a picture that would be far more useful than the basic demographic information that marketeers use today that consists of little more than sex, age and social grouping.
[...] Yaniv Altshuler at Ben Gurion University and a few pals argue that the value of this data makes it almost inevitable that malicious attackers will attempt to steal it. They point out that many companies already mine the pattern of links in their data for things like recommender systems. … (Technology Review, Oct 8 2010)
