'socialbots' Steal 250Gb Of User Data In Facebook Invasion

Programs designed to resemble humans infiltrated Facebook recently and made off with 250 gigabytes of personal information belonging to thousands of the social network's users, researchers said in an academic paper released today.

The eight-week study was designed to evaluate how vulnerable online social networks are to large-scale infiltrations by programs designed to mimic real users, researchers from the University of British Columbia Vancouver said in the paper (PDF), titled "The Socialbot Network: When bots socialize for fame and money."

The 102 "socialbots" researchers released onto the social network included a name and profile picture of a fictitious Facebook user and were capable of posting messages and sending friend requests. They then used these bots to send friend requests to 5,053 randomly selected Facebook users. Each account was limited to sending 25 requests per day to prevent triggering anti-fraud measures. During that initial two-week "bootstrapping" phase, 976 requests, or about 19 percent, were accepted.

During the next six weeks, the bots sent connection requests to 3,517 Facebook friends of users who accepted requests during the first phase. Of those, 2,079 users, or about 59 percent, accepted the second round of requests. The increase was due to what researchers called the "triadic closure principle," which predicts that if two users had a mutual friend in common, they were three times more likely to become connected.

Researchers found that social networks were "highly vulnerable" to a large-scale infiltration, with an 80 percent infiltration rate.

Networks' defense mechanisms, such as Facebook Immune System, are ineffective in identifying and eliminating fake profiles, researchers found. Only 20 percent of the socialbots were blocked by FIS, and that was only because users flagged the accounts as spam.

Researchers cautioned that the data available to the bots could be used for identity theft.

A Facebook representative initially declined to address the specifics of the report, saying that Facebook would use the research as part of its process of addressing new threats and that the network has defenses in place to prevent theft of user data.


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