From internet news

Facebook users are on high alert this week for another e-mail scam advising that their accounts have been reset and asking them to reset their passwords through an attachment contained in the unsolicited e-mail.

But as security software vendor McAfee (NYSE: MFE) details in a blog posting, the attachment is actually a password stealer that is installed when users click on the link.

The potentially damaging e-mail is titled “Facebook Password Reset Confirmation! Customer Support,” and Facebook officials are telling users to immediately delete the message to avoid infecting their PCs and mobile devices.

Once the phishing agent is installed, it can access any username or password entered on the computer or mobile devices, putting users’ online banking account log-ins and other sensitive information at risk.

“This threat is potentially very dangerous considering that there are over 400 million Facebook users who could fall for this scam,” McAfee researchers said. “This is also the sixth most prevalent piece of malware targeting consumers in the last 24 hours, as tracked by McAfee Labs.”

With an estimated 400 million users worldwide, it’s easy to understand why hackers love to target Facebook with various phishing and malware scams on an almost weekly basis.

In January, a massive scareware campaign plagued the site for a couple days, attempting to lure Facebook users into installing bogus antivirus software on their computers.

McAfee officials said this latest malware project included “tens of millions” of spam messages sent to users around the world and would likely result in the infection of millions of computers.

McAfee recommends users install the latest version of its antivirus software to protect themselves from attacks of this type and reminds users to never click on any links or attachments contained in unsolicited e-mails regardless of how authentic or personalized they appear to be.

Twitter Boasts 70,000 Apps

By david Needle internetnews

There are millions of Twitter users, but the number of application developers supporting the microblogging platform isn’t too shabby, either.

In an inaugural e-mail newsletter detailing the company’s progress, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said some 70,000 registered applications have been created for the platform. Third-party applications do everything from helping users manage their Twitter accounts and lists of followers to finding discussion groups and videos on specific topics.

While often dinged in industry circles for not having a revenue model, Twitter continues to expand as a company: Stone said in his e-mail that registered user accounts have grown more than 1,500 percent while Twitter’s number of employees have grown 500 percent.

Company officials have indicated they plan to introduce advertising and other potential revenue streams.

In the meantime, though, Twitter is focusing heavily on its developer community. Stone said the company will hold its first conference next month. The first Chirp conference for Twitter developers is set for April 14-15 in San Francisco.

Recapping the past year, Stone also noted several features that have been added to Twitter, including “the ability to create lists, quickly spread information with a retweet button, and an easier way to activate your mobile phone to work with Twitter over SMS. We also built a new mobile Web site that looks and works much better on smartphones.”

Stone also said that Twitter had “a little dance party” to celebrate the hiring of its 140th employee: “His name is Aaron and he’s an engineer focused on building internal tools to help promote productivity, communication, and support within our company.”

Twitter’s hyper-growth has not been without a few bumps along the way as the service has had to weather service outages and security attacks.

Stone didn’t touch on those issues in his e-mail, but he did highlight how Twitter has been used in crisis situations to inform and aid people in need. Tweets are frequently cited by news organization looking to get the latest information from crisis flashpoints like the earthquake in Haiti and demonstrations in Iran.

“By working together during critical times when others needed help, sharing important information that otherwise might not make the news, and inventing new and interesting ways to use Twitter, you’ve shown us that Twitter is more than a triumph of technology — it is a triumph of humanity,” Stone said. “Projects like Fledgling and Hope140 were inspired by you.”

Facebook Redesigns Site, Looks to 400M Users

By Kenneth Corbin from internetnews

As it nears another major milestone, social networking giant Facebook has begun rolling out a set of changes to its home page designed to simplify the site.

Facebook has begun rolling out a site-wide redesign, shuffling the layout of its home page in an effort to simplify the navigation and give prominent placement to some of the most popular features.

The company also marked its sixth anniversary on Thursday, marking the occasion with the announcement that it expects to sign up its 400 millionth user, extending its runaway lead in the social networking space.

The redesign comes after several months of testing various iterations of the home page, Facebook said.

Facebook has a checkered history with its site redesigns and policy adjustments, often drawing the ire of its large and vocal community of users. But the new changes in large measure aim to address one of the primary complaints previous designs, namely that the site was too confusing and cluttered.

The new home page highlights several content-oriented features such as photos, applications and games with links to dashboards in a column on the left side of the page.

The applications and games dashboards will display the content users have interacted with the most recently, and showcase the recent activities of people’s friends.

“You will also start to see counters next to the applications you have bookmarked on your home page,” Facebook engineer Jing Chen said in a blog post. “Counters will notify you when you have a specific action to take, so that you never miss your turn in a game or an update from a friend in an application.”

In a nod to the privacy concerns that have arisen about third-party applications on the site, Facebook has created a new setting that allows users to prevent their activities in games and other apps from showing up on friends’ pages.

“We’re also working on a more granular set of controls for specific applications, so that you can turn off activity for certain applications while leaving it on for others,” Chen said. “We’ll have more information to share on this soon.”

Facebook’s instant messaging product is also getting more exposure. Now, a partial list of a user’s friends who are online appears on the left side of the page. That list is selective, displaying the people the user communicates with the most frequently. The full list of online friends is still available as a pop-up in the chat bar at the lower right-hand corner of the screen.

Alerts about notifications, requests and messages are now consolidated in the top menu, which displays a red bubble that expands to a drop-down menu displaying the information. That information was previously scattered throughout the right side of the screen.

Like clockwork, the more than 4,000 comments appended to the Facebook blog post announcing the changes contain a mixture of enthusiasm for the new look and invective against the company, both for its design choices and the unilateral decision to impose the redesign on its users.