Selling friendships on Facebook for businesses

An Australian businessman accused of selling "friends" from the social networking site Facebook hit back Friday, saying it would be "very difficult" to stop him.

Facebook warned Thursday that members who bought information from the Australian online marketing company uSocial.net could be banned from the site.

Leon Hill, 24, who founded and owns uSocial.net, agreed that his customers could be breaching Facebook's terms of service -- but added that Facebook was almost powerless to stop him.

He said Facebook would be "well within their rights" to ban its members who accepted uSocial.net's offer but that it "would be almost impossible to track what we're doing."

Hill's Brisbane-based firm this week angered Facebook by offering to sell a user 1,000 friends for 177 US dollars and 5,000 friends -- the limit imposed by Facebook on a standard profile account -- for 654 dollars.

Facebook "fan" pages have no limits and uSocial.net said it could supply 1,000 Facebook fans for 177 dollars and 10,000 fans for 1,167 dollars.

Likening his service to a dating agency, Hill said his company manually scrolled through Facebook's millions of pages for users who had listed an interest in or already had links to a particular client's industry.

For example, he said they trawled Facebook on behalf of a dealer in performance car parts to find people with an interest in the automotive industry, who were then sent a friend request or fan suggestion.

"We don't manipulate accounts at all," he said. "We are targeting people for our clients but at the end of the day it's all up to the end user," he said.

Hill said his company did the same thing with microblogging site Twitter, which he said had tried unsuccessfully to stop its members using uSocial.net.

"In the end the thing is that I'm not actually ever doing anything against the terms of service -- it's the actual users who purchases my services (who is)," he said.

"Unless they actually say anything, unless they make it known to Facebook or Twitter that they've actually bought my services, there's absolutely nothing they (Facebook or Twitter) can do."

Symantec names history's top Web threats

To mark the 40th anniversary of the Internet, IT security firm Symantec on Friday identified 10 of the most notorious threats ever seen online.

The top 10 are:

1. I Love You (2000) – Who wouldn’t open an e-mail with “I Love You” in the subject line? Well, that was the problem. By May 2000, 50 million infections of this worm had been reported. The Pentagon, the CIA, and the British Parliament all had to shut down their e-mail systems in order to purge the threat.
2. Conficker (2009) – The Conficker worm has created a secure, worldwide infrastructure for cybercrime. The worm allows its creators to remotely install software on infected machines. What will that software do? We don’t know. Most likely the worm will be used to create a botnet that will be rented out to criminals who want to send SPAM, steal IDs and direct users to online scams and phishing sites.
3. Melissa (1999) – Melissa was an exotic dancer and David L. Smith was obsessed with her and also with writing viruses. The virus he named after Melissa and released to the world on March 26th, 1999, kicked off a period of high-profile threats that rocked the Internet between 1999 and 2005.
4. Slammer (2003) – This fast-moving worm managed to temporarily bring much of the Internet to its knees in January of 2003. The threat was so aggressive that it was mistaken by some countries to be an organized attack against them.
5. Nimda (2001) – A mass-mailing worm that uses multiple methods to spread itself, within 22 minutes, Nimda became the Internet’s most widespread worm. The name of the virus came from the reversed spelling of "admin."
6. Code Red (2001) – Websites affected by the Code Red worm were defaced by the phrase "Hacked By Chinese!" At its peak, the number of infected hosts reached 359,000.
7. Blaster (2003) – Blaster is a worm that triggered a payload that launched a denial of service attack against windowsupdate.com, which included the message, “billy gates why do you make this possible? Stop making money and fix your software!!”
8. Sasser (2004) – This nasty worm spread by exploiting a vulnerable network port, meaning that it could spread without user intervention. Sasser wreaked havoc on everything from The British Coast Guard to Delta Airlines, which had to cancel some flights after its computers became infected.
9. Storm (2007) – Poor Microsoft, always the popular target. Like Blaster and others before, this worm’s payload performed a denial-of-service attack on www.microsoft.com. During Symantec’s tests an infected machine was observed sending a burst of almost 1,800 emails in a five-minute period.
10. Morris (1988) – An oldie but a goodie; without Morris the current threat “superstars” wouldn’t exist. The Morris worm (or Internet worm) was created with innocent intentions. Robert Morris claims that he wrote the worm in an effort to gauge the size of the Internet. Unfortunately, the worm contained an error that caused it to infect computers multiple times, creating a denial of service.