Facebook's Timeline will be boon for hackers

23.09.2011
Facebook's new Timeline will make it even easier for criminals and others to mine the social network for personal information they can use to launch malicious attacks and steal passwords, a researcher said today.

Timeline, which at a developer conference and plans to roll out to users in a few weeks, summarizes important past events in a one-page display.

According to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Timeline is "the story of your life,"

That has experts at U.K.-based Sophos concerned.

"Timeline makes it a heck of a lot easier [for attackers] to collect information on people," said Chet Wisniewski, a Sophos security researcher. "It's not that the data isn't already there on Facebook, but it's currently not in an easy-to-use format."

Cybercriminals often unearth personal details from social networking sites to craft targeted attacks, noted Wisniewski, and Timeline will make their job simpler.