Facebook: Welcome to the World of Google Hacking

To be completely honest, sites like Facebook has the same appeal to me as reality TV, which almost zero! Anyway a friend of mine a couple months back bullied me into setting up an account on Facebook. But being a typical paranoid security guy, I didn’t upload any photos or post any personal information, other than my name and a fake Date of Birth, I guess it’s the most boring Facebook page on the whole site!

The way I understood it, Facebook was suppose to be a private network, where you add links and share your personal information including work and educational history with friends, work colleagues and former class mates etc. Significantly you either had to accept an invite or have your own invite accepted by another party, before your information is shared.

But here’s the big scary change, Facebook are now allowing members personal information to be accessible by everyone, even non-members. We are not just talking private pictures either, but information such as people’s date of birth, which is often used as a typical security question, especially when you are asked to prove who you are or asked to reset a password.

Within the next few weeks, Facebook profiles will be indexed and be fully searchable by search engines like Google and Yahoo. The art of “Google Hacking” is about searching for information about a target (person), for example a fraudster may have already obtained some of your private details elsewhere, they will then use a search engine like Google to fill in all the blanks, building the full picture and completing the profile, this is especially common place when you are talking about identify theft, which is on the rise in the UK.

You might be really surprised what’s searchable on Google about you, just give it go. When demonstrating Google hacking in the past, I have actually found people’s mobile phone numbers and even full home addresses.

Apparently there is a way to prevent your Facebook profile details to going into search engines like Google, but a friend of mine, who is an avid Facebook user, couldn't find the option to do it.