A fortnight ago I got a mail from a site stating that I have registered on it long back but have not used its services since then. Thanks to my knack of reading the log files and examining the cookies, I was appalled to find that I had never been on this site before. After further investigations, I came across a scary fact. The site that has sent me the mail had all the details and information about me which I normally have on my profile on various social networking sites.

Now the situation was clear in front of me. There can be two possible reasons for it. Either these social networking sites are selling the user information or hackers have the keys to their databases. Though both of these reasons were born out of the fear and insecurity, but were quite impossible. I had a discussion with few of my friends who are part of the cyber world and then after a long discussion I came to conclusion that it was none other than me who did the foolish act. This website only exploited it.

The next day, while reading news, I came to know that computer security specialists have concluded that Facebook users have been hit with a series of data stealing attacks in the past week as cyber crooks are stalking the social networking websites. Facebook has become prime hunting ground for swindlers and malicious software spreaders because it is the leading social networking community with more than 175 million people sharing the personal information.

David Perry, Global Director of education at software security firm Trend Micro said, “There are so many people on social networking sites that it is becoming profitable for bad guys to go there. Bad guys can see all the things you post. You may be revealing personal information that is extremely valuable.”

After much research and study, I came across few eternal facts which most of us don’t give a damn. I was astounded to know that even seemingly naive information posted on profile pages can sometimes be quite useful for the online criminals. For example, names of grand parents or pets in posted pictures can tip hackers off to answers for typical challenge questions asked before providing information about “forgotten passwords” to online accounts.

Honestly speaking, it was bit discouraging to know this fact. If we don’t post few details on the profile page then it somehow and somewhere defeats the goal of social networking websites. Hackers try to infect software used on social networking sites with malicious code and dupe people in the trust based communities with fake messages and rigged mini applications. Facebook soar to popularity after it began letting outside developers craft mini applications that people customize and use on their profile pages with hip, fun or functional features. Facebook only approves mini-applications which pass its quality testing pipeline.

Recently, Facebook was under attack, wherein the users began receiving the messages claiming to be from friends that wanted to share digital video of the receivers. As soon as the user clicked on the link, it resulted in a prompt to download viewing software that is actually called Koobface, a variation on the spelling of Facebook. It steals the cookie on the users’ desktop not just for Facebook but for more than half-dozen high traffic social networking websites including MySpace. At this point, the users account is compromised and it uses the hijacked cookie to login to the account, goes through the address book and starts posting messages everywhere.

Last year, Orkut too greatly revamped its functionality due to frequent attacks and misuse of the information. It had many flaws which helped the cyber criminals a lot to easily carry out the complex tasks. The best advantage that the stalkers had on the earlier version of Orkut was that they can easily follow anyone on this social networking site without being registered as a friend. The photograph viewing ability made this task bit more mundane. Of late, but Orkut realized this flaw and carried out literally big changes to defeat the motives of stalkers.

Whatever may be the case, but I have learnt to conceal my personal information on the Internet as I have understood the repercussions of being lenient into this matter. Even if I have to exchange or post the information, I make sure that I do it with a verified resource.