Online Groups Help Hackers ID You

July 28, 2010

A recent discovery by the Vienna Institute of Technology has found a way for hackers to discover what groups you belong to and use that information for identity theft or for personalized scams.

These hackers can ‘capture’ a users socal networking group from Facebook or Linkedin, for example, form a persons browser. This is called history stealling. They then can build a profile of the users real-life identity with about a 42 percent accuracy.

Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and other major social networks allows others to see who belongs to certain groups. Another feature Facebook has that can be exploited is the Like button. Hackers can collect a users ‘Likes’ and create a profile of what the person’s opinions are. Again, build on information that a user has put out there.

Browser makers have begun to work on this problem of history stealling by limiting the number of links a site can check every second. But, the method of attack will continue to work until everyone moves up to the latest browsers.