Computer Press!

Security experts have demonstrated Facebook Pwn, a Java tool which uses social engineering to obtain personal details of Facebook users that are not publicly accessible.

The tool starts out by setting up a fake account which attempts to befriend all of the target’s contacts. The attacker picks out one of the victim’s friends whose identity he can adopt and the tool steals this friend’s name and profile picture for the fake account. The tool then uses the fake account to submit a friend request to the target – the target is confronted with a familiar name, a copy of their friend’s photo and a list of mutual friends.

A Chandler, Ariz., man has pleaded guilty to charges related to his role in a pump-and-dump scam that inflated penny stock prices via spam and hacked computers.

James Bragg, 41, faces five years in prison and a $250,000 fine for orchestrating the hacking and spamming portions of the scheme, which ran between November 2007 and February 2009, according to prosecutors. He pleaded guilty Wednesday in U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey.

Bragg used a Russian botnet operator, named only as B.T. in court documents, to send the spam and to access hacked brokerage accounts and buy the penny stocks without the victim’s knowledge.

Employee of the firm in charge of World Cup 2010 ticketing found peddling birth dates, passport, other data of 2006 World Cup customers.

Hundreds of thousands of attendees at the 2006 World Cup in Germany were put at risk of identity theft, though the major breach of a FIFA database was only recently uncovered.

Initially reported by Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet, the breach came to light when an employee of the firm in charge of World Cup 2010 ticketing circulated an e-mail peddling more than 250,000 2006 World Cup customer details, including such personal information as birth dates and passport information.