BitDefender polled 2713 Facebook members between the ages of 18–65 to examine how friends interact on social networking sites. What it found were some behaviors that could be described as potential gaping security lapses, in addition to being extremely unhelpful to those we consider – sometimes loosely – to be friends.
The findings were outlined by Sabina Datcu, a statistician by trade and researcher with BitDefender’s E-Threat Analysis and Communication Team. Datcu batted around some philosophical definitions of friendship in a recent blog, as she sought to answer the question: “What kind of friends do I have within an online social network?”
Apparently, not very good ones, according to the data collected by BitDefender. The respondents had an average of 137 Facebook friends, with 42% admitting they had “unknown people” in their friend list.
“Yes, unknown people can be your friends within a social network”, Datcu joked when reviewing this informational nugget.
Perhaps more disturbing was that 87% of those polled had noticed suspicious spam-like messages being generated by applications their friends were using, yet only 43% took steps to warn their so-called Facebook friends about applications “gone wild”.
Compounding this are the 68% of respondents who admitted to clicking on these rouge Facebook applications, therefore spreading them further to their own friend list. These Facebook users said they were unaware that the application was fake, which may make them slightly better friends than the 25% of respondents who said they simply did not have the time to warn their friends about suspicious posts.
Dactu added that the interview concluded by asking the users if they use any type of “security solution for Facebook”. Not surprisingly, 93% responded that they had no security in place, “which means that their accounts are completely exposed”, Dactu warned.