Researchers build malicious Facebook application

From InfoWorld: A team of researchers have built a malicious Facebook program an experiment to demonstrate the possible dangers of social networking applications.

The experiment shows the ease with which attackers could dupe large number of users into downloading a seemingly harmless application that actually performs a clandestine attack that can cripple a Web site.

Those requests, as well as those images, are not seen by someone using Photo of the Day, which the researchers have termed a "Facebot" application. The effect is a flood of traffic to the victim's Web site, known as a denial-of-service attack.

They then monitored traffic on a Web site they set up for Photo of the Day to attack. If those traffic figures were applied to Facebook applications that have a million or more users, they estimated a victim's Web site could be bombarded by as much as 23Mbps of traffic, or 248GB of unwanted data per day.

View: Article @ Source Site