The company presented the results of a study about social gaming’s impact on the exposure of users’ private data at an MIT Spam Conference this week. Social games require users to gather as many friends and supporters as possible to play the same game, said the research, published as a paper by George Lucian Petre, Threat Intelligence Team Leader at BitDefender. This causes players to aggressively develop networks of contacts, even when they do not know those people very well.
In regular social networks, users are less likely to add strangers to their circle, according to the research. However, in social gaming, strange profiles are a commodity that can be used to increase social capital for the purpose of achieving a higher score in the game. Therefore, gamers are more likely to add fake profiles, Petre said.
The more closely those fake accounts mimicked real profiles by containing the alleged real details and pictures of supposedly real users, the more likely that social gamers were to add them to their own networks.
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After joining social gaming groups, the volume of users willing to add unknown people drastically increased, said the research. "We have seen that in a social applications environment, users can easily be tricked to add spammers to their profile. Thus, we recommend social gaming aficionados use extreme caution before enlarging their circle of friends,” Petre added.