Facebook IM On The Way

For the legions of Facebook junkies there is yet another way for them to blow away their work day stay in touch with their friends. Well at least it is “unofficially” a Facebook application. This is apparently going to be released this Friday. Now, from a productivity standpoint this is an uber money pit for businesses that allow employees to access the popular social networking site.

With the addition of the instant messaging client this will introduce another potential attack surface for business and government. We have seen the very real instance of JavaScript based worms such as the Samy worm that tore across MySpace recently. With the amount of development that is underway on Facebook it is not much of a reach to assume that the ne’er do wells are on the development bandwagon.

From Mashable:

While it’s important to note that this does not appear to be an official Facebook IM application, it’s noteworthy because, well, it’s on the Facebook platform, but also because it will run completely within Facebook and not require a downloadable client. This means that in theory you could simply login to Facebook to see which of your friends are online and initiate a conversation.

So, how long until we have a Facebook worm? To say nothing of the data loss potential in light of recent P2P incidents and the potential courtship in the works with Microsoft.

Article Link

[tags]Facebook IM, Facebook Instant Messenging, Attack Surface, Samy[/tags]

Posted by Dave Lewis on September 26, 2007. Filed under Malware,Web Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry