"You have a friend request from ___________" is a common message on Facebook. What isn't common is that request being sent by a robot. Throughout the past few weeks "socialbots" have been silently getting over 250, that's right 250 gigabytes of data! It's unbelievable that all of facebook's affected users and, more amazingly facebook itself didn't realize this. The programmers of these "bots" were a group of Canadian users at the university of British Columbia. It's amazing though that just over 25% percent of the targeted users accepted, not suspicious at all about receiving a friend request from someone they've never heard of.
This is a sad thing though because, all these people put almost every aspect of their personal life out for the world to see. I mean the social bots collected 250 gb's worth of data including real phone numbers, email addresses, web links, passwords, and precious memories. Even though this was just a project, if this was a real harmful, potentially malicious virus, it would still go basically undected, only 20% of the bots were detected and the others where eventually taken off. What I mean to say is:"Be careful what you put out there, cause' it may end up on a server somewhere in a hackers lab.
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| "Can I be your friend" |
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