LAS VEGAS—Sometimes our friends aren’t really our friends. Just ask security researchers Nathan Hamiel and Shawn Moyer.

Hamiel, senior consultant for Idea Information Security, and Moyer, Agura Digital Security’s chief information security officer, teamed up before an audience Aug. 7 at the Black Hat conference to lay bare some of the security risks users of social networking sites face.

The attacks they discussed ran the gamut and included exploits that allowed hackers to add friends to—as well as log legitimate users out of—compromised MySpace accounts. The duo even created a phony profile on LinkedIn for fellow security professional Marcus Ranum, chief security officer at Tenable Network Security. Within a day, more than 50 people reportedly had fallen for the ruse and joined the phony profile as “connections.”

What the demonstration by Hamiel and Moyer showed is that personal data on social networking sites can be manipulated by attackers. However, their Black Hat presentation was far from the first time security pros have put social networking sites under the microscope. Also on Aug. 7, researchers at Sophos published information about an attempt by hackers to infect Facebook users by spreading messages with malicious links.

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