Micro-blogging service Twitter and social networking site Facebook have been severely disrupted by hackers. Both sites now have millions of users worldwide. Facebook claims more than 250m active users whilst a ComScore study suggests that Twitter had around 45 million users worldwide as of June 2009. However, as many users interact with the service through mobile phones or third-party software, the actual number of users is likely to be higher. Twitter was taken offline for more than two hours whilst Facebook's service was "degraded", according to the firms. The popular sites were subject to so-called denial-of-service attacks. Denial-of-service (DOS) attacks take various forms but often involve a company's servers being flooded with data in an effort to disable them.
The Companies claim that no harm has been done to the User's data and things are under control. We should be very careful while playing games and/or giving out the Email Id and Password to choose friends we add on it. After all this I wondered how does Facebook come up with Friend Suggestion List. Sometimes they come up with names that don't even have a mutual friend. The only way I could think of was that person's email ID is in my email provider's address book. And when I had used the Facebook Friend Finder feature, I had given Facebook access to my address book so that it could tell me which of my friends were already in there. Though Facebook claims that they do not store passwords still we are exposing our private data.
After this event we should be very aware as to what we are doing and should make it a habit to verify the links before clicking it. Just a few safety measures from our side would keep us safe and help the always-connected, always-on Internet culture.
And google as well. :)
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