Archive for August 3rd, 2007

Unintentionally distributed badware “may harm your computer”

Here’s an interesting blog post about a website which was hacked to distribute malware. This has also happened to me on my sites, and it’s a really insidious problem. More and more websites on the internet are dynamic. This typically means that they’re user collaborative. Social sites like Facebook and others are quickly expanding and becoming huge, open platforms. While this can be good, it also means a lot of potential attack points and a lot of serious risks, especially when personal information is involved. In the case of Facebook, there’s actually little protection for the users regarding what application developers can do. This is great because this gives developers a lot of flexibility to do truly innovative things. But the downside is pretty bad. Facebook has already taken steps against this by instituting spamminess filters, though these are not perfectly accurate. And as we try to protect users more and more, developers are going to lose the freedoms they once had.

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