ShmooCon: Inside FarmVille's sinister underbelly: Via Computerworld Security News.

You love Facebook apps like FarmVille and Mafia Wars and think they're perfectly safe, right? Think again.

You see it all the time on Facebook: A friend moving on up in FarmVille. Another friend trying to expand his posse in Mafia Wars. Everyone thinks of them as harmless third-party applications, free from the crooks and cooks of cyberspace.

Unfortunately, that's not the case.

The sad fact is that these applications are susceptible to malware pushers and those looking to steal your personal information. It's not much of a stretch for hackers to impersonate people you think are trusted, fellow players, as is the case with a lot of online gaming. And the more you expose yourself, the bigger the target you become.

The dangers of these games were part of a larger talk on social networking dangers at the 2010 ShmooCon security conference. Indeed, social networkers are in danger from all corners, be it from malicious Twitter bots you think is a celebrity following you or that hot model who friended you on Facebook, hoping you wouldn't notice that she's nothing more than a phishing hook.

In their talk, "Social Zombies II: Your Friends Need More Brains," security practitioners Tom Eston, Kevin Johnson and Robin Wood continued what they started in their "Social Zombies: Your Friends want to eat Your Brains" presentation at DEFCON 17.

They presented new techniques and tools used to exploit people on these social networks. They also examined how all your profile information is being used against you and eroding your privacy [related story: 6 Ways We Gave Up Our Privacy].

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In one of their more colorful examples, the trio explained how actress Jessica Biel is the most dangerous woman on the Internet because of all the fake profiles of her scattered throughout the social networking landscape.

Read Original Article:(Via Computerworld Security News.)