Slapped in the Facebook: Social Networking Dangers Exposed

Hamiel noted that the trouble begins with so much creative power being put in the hands of those who have little or no tech savvy.

"Any application can be used to attack other applications and an application can be used to view your entire file if the privacy settings are off," he said. "Even if you put the privacy settings in place, you should assume you are screwed."

The demonstrations the duo ran through included:

Creating imposter profiles on LinkedInLinkedIn, assuming the identity of someone prominent, and friending as many people as possible. For the sake of experimentation, the researchers created a fake profile for a well-known security leader (with permission) and accumulated 50-plus connections in less than a day, many of them CSOs and other bigwigs. Alles zu LinkedIn auf CIO.de

Showing how to sabotage the MySpace page of someone you're not directly connected with via the profile of a common connection. This example involved fake Myspace pages for rocker Alice Cooper and actors Eva Longoria and Bob Saget. In this scenario, Cooper and Longoria are connected to Saget but not to each other. Longoria wants to connect with Cooper, who refuses, and she responds my using their common connection to Saget to access and deface Cooper's page.