This is obvious, but also clever in the way of many clever things in that the attack is only obvious after it’s been explained to you. In short, if an attacker sucessfully impersonates someone you know, or gives you the impression you may / should know them, they may be able to exploit you.
Like many things, social networking sites are great until you let people use them. Yes there’s a certain disappointment when you discover a contact now hides their friends list, you can wonder what you’ve done wrong (although admittedly not so much as when that “view photos of so and so” link you used to use to browse pictures of said contact in their bikini that person to see how they were doing suddenly disappears from view. Does anyone know if the default setting on facebook is now to hide the friends list? (I doubt it somehow).
It occurs to me more and more that maybe we need to get away from being so tribal (trusting people because they look like us, or our friends appear to know them and immediately distrusting people who seem odd) and through getting most of our information once it has been squeezed into convenient stories or concepts, even if those don’t evoke much of a response anymore (see below). Funnily enough you can just imagine anyone reading this post through after it gets linked on facebook, tutting or uttering “oh dear”. Ho Hum.
