ARE you a member of an antisocial network? It seems that unwary Facebook users can be tricked into attacking innocent websites without knowing it.
A team from the Foundation for Research and Technology in Heraklion, Greece, created an application called FaceBot whose ostensible purpose was to present a striking photo to users every day. However, each time a user accessed the application, it also downloaded four images from a targeted website 鈥� the team鈥檚 own 鈥� which it presented in hidden frames invisible to the user.
At the peak of FaceBot鈥檚 popularity, its 1000 or so users had significantly increased the data transfer from the test website, straining its web server. The work will be presented at this year鈥檚 in Taipei, Taiwan, next month.
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