Socialbots steal your personal information on facebook

A group of researchers have recently demonstrated a simple technique to collect personal information of facebook users on a massive scale.
The research paper titled "The Socialbot Network: When bots socialize for fame and money" shows how small computer programs called SocialBots can be designed to mimic actual humans, send friend requests, post on walls and easily get past facebook's spam detection mechanism.

Methodology

Socialbots operate in a huge sophesticated but work on a very simple method i.e. they socialize easily. Socialbots send first batch of friend requests to randomly selected users, then keep sending requests to mutual friends, thereby increasing acceptance rate. Also number of requests is limited to 25 per day to avoid getting blocked. The larger the friend list, the more personal information is available to them for collection.

Why bother ?

By following this simple procedure and repeating it again and again, socialbots can extract huge amounts of sensitive information like email, phone, address which can, then, be misued, sold or used for identity theft etc. Researcher's have claimed to have collected over 250GB of user data in about 8 weeks which is very impressive and clearly tells how week facebook's immune system (FIS) is.

Stay safe

This is why you should only accept friend requests of people you personally know. This is also why you should not disclose too many personal details on a social network. Take care of these too and you'll not have to worry to much. Also facebook developers learn from this kind of research and develop new techniques to keep your data safe.