8 chapTer 1 Social Networking Infrastructure Attacks owning the Social Network I love using my social networks. I'm able to keep and get back in contact with people I haven't seen since high school. You know, your old buddy, all of the different girl- friends, and even that jerk you really didn't like. What about all of those cool applications? Wow, there are so many different ones. I can pretend to be a mafia member, get daily personal training updates, or get that really cool application called photo-of-the-day that provides you with a new National Geographic picture every day. I really like that application. What if these applications were really applications that used my computer to attack other computers? That's pretty scary. I don't think I could fall victim to that. Not me, that couldn't happen, right? Wrong!!! There was a group that decided to prove that you could do just that. This group performed a proof-of-concept in which they created a Facebook app, which turned users into members of a puppetnet. A puppetnet is a next-generation limited botnet that utilizes the Web browser instead of placing a file on the computer. We will discuss this in the section "Dissecting the Puppetnet." I have a question for you: "What does a social network have a lot of?" Give up? Users and what can users become? Bots in a botnet. What else do social networks