Researchers Experiment on Facebook App
A group of researchers conducted an experiment to determine the potential dangers of social networking sites. An application, dubbed as "Photo of the Day", was developed which serves up a new National Geographic photo daily. Everytime this photo is clicked, it transmits a 600 kilobyte HTTP request for images to the user's web site boosting the site's traffic. This is also known as denial of service attack.
The researchers uploaded the application to Facebook in January and to date, 1,000 people have already installed it in their profiles. They then monitored traffic on a web site they set up for Photo of the Day to attack. If those traffic figures were applied to Facebook applications that have millions of users, an estimated of 248 gigabytes of unsolicited data are sent per day.
Photo of the Day is still listed on Facebook, with 543 users. The experiment was conducted by the Foundation for Research and Technology in Heraklion, Greece, and the Institute for Infocomm Research in Singapore.
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