Social Networking sites

I wanted to make a quick Blog posting based on something I took notice of recently. I read an interesting post from Martin McKeay on the Network Security Blog a few weeks back and wanted to offer my two cents. I agree wholeheartedly with Martin's posting. For a while now I've had friends use the words MySpace and Facebook as nouns and verbs. Just as Google has been used in the last 7 or 8 years, phrases like "I have her Facebook", or "He MySpace'd me yesterday" have become the norm. Let's face it, email as a social communication medium is dieing (if not already dead) when speaking in terms of the youth of today.

While these social networking sites are incredibly popular and can serve as a valuable resource to people, if you choose to create an account for one of these sites always take care when signing up and posting information about yourself online. Posting to publicly accessible websites means exactly that; its public.

There are also inevitable technical problems with these systems. Recently Facebook's source code was leaked. Leaked source code means bad guys find vulnerabilities with the website and exploit them to steal enormous amounts of information. Your personal information.

So I encourage anyone who wishes to sign up for these social networking sites to err on the side of caution, and thoroughly query every step you take.