'Socialbots' Steal User Data in Facebook Invasion

An eight-week study titled "The Socialbot Network: When bots socialize for fame and money" evaluated how vulnerable online social networks are to large-scale infiltrations by socialbots. Researchers found that programs designed to mimic real users stole 250GB of personal information in Facebook. 

The 102 "socialbots" researchers released onto the social network included a name and profile picture of a fictitious Facebook user and were capable of posting messages and sending friend requests. They then used these bots to send friend request to 5,053 randomly selected Facebook users. Each account was limited to sending 25 requests per day to prevent triggering anti-fraud measures. During that initial two-week "bootstrapping" phase, 976 requests, or about 19 percent, were accepted.

During the next six weeks, the bots sent connection requests to 3,517 Facebook friends of users who accepted requests during the first phase. Of those, 2,079 users, or about 59 percent, accepted the second round of requests. The increase was due to what researchers called the "triadic closure principle," which predicts that if two users had a mutual friend in common, they were three times more likely to become connected.

Researchers found that social networks were "highly vulnerable" to a large-scale infiltration, with an 80 percent infiltration rate.