I’ve recently been noticing a lot of complaints from my facebook friends about the changes to the Facebook User Interface (UI). Along with the UI changes, Facebook has also changed their privacy policy over the last 6 months. What’s happening is that people are getting confused by the changes and assuming that the privacy and security settings are also changing. Added to this, Facebook is being used to distribute malware through their messaging system. This is a very bad combination.  

This morning I read an open letter to facebook on Computerworld that describes Facebook being used to distribute fake anti-virus pop ups to distribute malware by bad guys. I hadn’t seen this activity yet. If you have, I’d love to hear about it. I hope Facebook responds to these issues and is able to turn things around.  It’s an incredible resource and it’s a shame to see it falling into these practices. 

What do you think about Facebook’s security and privacy practices? Is it really that bad?

From Mashable today:

“A Twitter phishing attack is spreading rapidly today, attempting to obtain Twitter logins via Direct Messages. If you receive a message reading “lol, is this you”, and linking to a site called “bzpharma”, do not click the link.”

Phishing scams are on the rise and Twitter and Facebook will likely bear the brunt of them. Please, always check the links first. There are a few ways to do this:

1. Always let your mouse hover over the link before clicking it. This way, you can see where the link is going before you click on it. If it’s a pharmaceutical site, and you’re not in the healthcare profession, it’s probably a scam.
2. On the Firefox and Chrome browsers, you can install a handy plugin called, Bit.ly Preview. This plugin shows the full URL of shortened links on Twitter. While not all links are shortened using Bit.ly, most are, and Bit.ly is the default URL shortener of Twitter.

Have you encountered any phishing scams on Twitter or Facebook? How did you resolve them?