Burglars Use Social Networks to Plan Attacks

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Social networking is a double-edged sword. While it encourages collaboration and interaction among friends, sites like Twitter and Facebook are also increasingly turning into tools used by common criminals in planning their attacks.

With 800 million active Facebook users and about 100 million active Twitter users, social networks are a rich place to mine information. But while businesses use information to target their marketing, a more shady kind of activity is happening, with burglars and thieves using information from social networks to look for victims and plan their attacks.

In the UK, 75% of convicted burglars say they have used social networking apps in planning their burglaries. In particular, these convicted felons say they used Google Street View in planning. The service, coupled with Google Maps, enables users to see a virtaul tour of available locations with a panoramic view. The same is being done on Twitter and Facebook. Potential victims are often monitored when they check in to a certain location, or when they share their activities.

Security experts say that tweeting or posting about being away on vacation is like an open invitation for burglary. Even when not going away for extended times, even announcing to the public that you’re not home is a risk. Most burglaries take about 10 minutes to commit, according to the respondents.

Still, it’s a two-way street. While felons will use Facebook, Twitter or Foursquare to track the movement of potential victims, security agencies and police authorities are also using social media to look for criminal activity. And this doesn’t just include online crime like identity theft and credit card scams. This also includes offline activities being coordinated online. And you cannot preclude the fact that some fiends are fond of advertising their exploits on social networks, as well.

But for everyone else, security experts advise users to safeguard our privacy, such as restricting location-aware posts to friends only, or even avoiding location-based posts.