Their presentation Feb. 7 at ShmooCon 2009 in Washington, D.C., was no exception, as the two walked through examples of attacks and social engineering on sites such as MySpace and LinkedIn.

As I told Moyer afterward, it is easy to walk away from their presentations with the impression that social networks are hopelessly broken. But there are a number ways the average user, application developers and site owners can improve security. 

Hamiel, senior security consultant with a company called Idea Integration, said that for starters social networking sites need better default privacy settings. When left to their own devices, the average user is probably not going to follow the most secure practices, he said.  For example, many people don’t think about the security implications of allowing HTML in comments on MySpace, he explained.

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