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The U.S. Marine Corps have officially banned social networking from military networks.  This means no Facebook, Twitter, or MySpace, among others.  The ban has actually been in place for sometime, but has only just now become official.  Marines who want to access such sites on their personal computers and devices on their own time are still free to do so.  The Marines site security concerns as the reason.

“These Internet sites in general are a proven haven for malicious actors and content and are particularly high risk due to information exposure, user generated content and targeting by adversaries,” the directive noted. “The very nature of [social networking sites] creates a larger attack and exploitation window, exposes unnecessary information to adversaries and provides an easy conduit for information leakage ...”

One can hardly blame the Marines as sites like Twitter have proven to be extremely attractive to hackers.  National security has to be protected.  However the sites themselves are only partially responsible.  The people who use them also hold responsibility. 

A few months ago a game called “Porn Name” swept through Twitter.  The gist of it was you take the name of the street you grew up with and add it to your mother’s maiden name and the name of your first pet to get your “Porn Name.”  You then were supposed to post it as a tweet (with appropriate hash tag) and encourage others to do the same.  The problem?  Think about the information the “game” asked for.  They are all common security questions asked by websites when you want to change your password.  That game was a hacker’s dream. 

Also not long ago the wife of the head of MI6, which is Britain’s version of the CIA, set up a Facebook page for herself.  She filled it with family photos, information about her kids and husband and their vacation plans, status updates about where they were and what they were doing—the normal things you find on Facebook pages, right?  Yes, but the problem was she never bothered to put any privacy controls in place so anyone who did a search for her husband’s name on Facebook or Google found her page with all that info.  That’s a really bad idea when your husband is the chief intelligence officer for your country!

The bottom line here is that yes, there are hackers and spammers on all the social networks spreading malware, spam, and phishing attacks.  However the sites do offer very good privacy controls (especially Facebook and MySpace) and it is up to you to use them.  Common sense is also important.  Don’t click on links in spam.  Don’t accept every friend request you get-check them out first.  Don’t auto-follow people that follow you on Twitter, check them out too.  Be careful about what applications you use on Facebook.  Many are fun and absolutely harmless but all of them access your info in various ways in order to function. 

This means that scammers have put some nasty ones out there.  Some are outright malicious, some try and trick you into giving your personal info to a phishing site, and some will spam everyone on your friends list.  So check out apps before you use them, even if you got a “gift” or “request” from a friend.  And absolutely never ever provide your usernames and passwords to anyone or any site that asks for them!  Just recently a site called TwitViewer claimed it could show you the last 200 people that visited your Twitter profile.  All you had to do was give them your username and password.  Those that did had TwitViewer spam everyone they were following and found themselves auto-following a list of complete strangers.  Yes, it was a total scam.  No site can tell you who visited your Twitter profile.  It’s not technologically possible.  Remember, common sense is a cybercriminal’s worst enemy!

It should be noted that the military isn’t anti-social networking at all.  The U.S. Central Command has a Facebook page, the Army is on MySpace and there is a U.S, Forces Afghanistan page on Facebook as well.  They just prefer to use them in a way that lets them have as much control as possible over what content is posted on such sites.

Read [PCWorld]