For several years now, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has had a special unit for monitoring social networks all over the world. The official name of this bureau is “Open Source Center”. Its employees are mostly hackers and linguists.

The primary goal of the bureau is the collection, filtration and analysis of information coming from social networks, as well as local forums, TV channels and other mass media. The reports of the bureau go directly to the White House.

Linguists and professional hackers from OSC are capable of filtering millions of posts in Twitter alone and finding information that others don’t have a clue about.
The bureau was created after 9/11 and the official reason for this was, obviously, “war on terrorism”.

In this program update there are not that many innovations, but it’s worth writing about it as well. It is made almost completely on the basis of joint work by programmers, the technical support department, and actual users of our programs.

In all the programs, we added the feature of capturing user’s messages in the VKontakte (vk.com) social network. Many users have asked me for this for a long time now.

The Ukrainian language was added to the programs’ interface. The translation was done by one of our users, so thank you very much to him.

We are continuing to work on improving the encrypting system for logs in Employee Monitor and Terminal Monitor. In extremely rare cases, it works incorrectly and greatly slows down the work of the program.

Thanks to reports like this from our users, we were able to solve the problem. In the next versions of the programs, we will be able to get rid of it completely.

Some time ago, Facebook got involved in a new scandal. The hype was based around the fact that HTTP cookies saved by Facebook on users’ computers remained there even after they logged out of the social network, thus casting a shadow of suspicion on it developers and created an impression that they could be monitoring users’ activities on other sites.

On September 25, Facebook officials sent a statement to major mass media assuring the public that they were not monitoring users’ activities on other websites.

However, on September 22, the US Patent and Trademarks Office received a patent application for a technology that made it possible to track user’s actions outside a social network.

It’s clear that “to patent” does not equal “to use”, but hardly anybody can guarantee that the social network will not get such functionality in the future.

Symantec (a leading information security software development company) is warning that one of the most popular networks in the world, Facebook.com, may have been leaking personal information for several years.

Experts believe that advertisers on the social network obtained information not only on customer profiles but also pages containing photo albums and personal correspondence. Moreover, they have the ability to post fake messages.

The social network’s applications also have a problem with personal information security. Experts believe that leaks are possible from over 100 thousand applications.

Facebook management have been informed of these issues and are already taking steps to guarantee users’ security. However, there has so far been no comment from the company.

A new wave of extortion viruses in the most popular social network in Russia, VKontakte, uses browser vulnerabilities as well as typical social engineering methods to distribute itself.

As “bait” the user is promised higher ratings in the social network or a certain amount of money in the network’s internal currency.

The user is directed to a phishing website which imitates the social network’s interface and asked to enter their password. The password is then stolen and used to send this offer to the user’s friends, while the user will receive an executable file which copies the contents of the operating system host file.

Then, when the user tries to enter almost any popular russian social network (Vkontakte, Odnoklassniki, Mail.ru), they land on the fraudster’s website, which asks them to send a paid SMS message.

The easiest way to remove such an infection is to manually clean the contents of the file “C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts” and check the computer drives with a good quality antivirus program.

Facebook has recently faced a number of information security problems. However, they were all solved in a timely manner and went unnoticed for the users and the general public. For instance, the Facebook team recently fixed a bug that allowed intruders to access personal users’ messages.

This year kicked off with a serious problem for the #1 social network. Two students, Zhou Li and Ruy Wang, found a vulnerability which allowed malicious websites to access Facebook users’ private data and spam their accounts.

By the time the students identified and described this scheme, it had been actively used by fraudsters who also used phishing sites that imitated popular online resources and services.
Facebook immediately reacted to the news and fixed the bug, which allowed it to prevent a major security scandal.

Graham Cluley from Sophos, an information security company, says that “Facebook is an extremely complex software system and occasional findings of security vulnerabilities are virtually inevitable”.