Cyber attacks are growing vigorously in the internet world. Recently hackers attacked a popular social networking site, Twitter ,where users can post 140 character messages to their friends, resulting in the shutdown of Twitter for two hours on Thursday (06/08/2009) morning and caused glitches in world’s popular social networking site Facebook.

Twitter and Face book users were not able to access the networking sites for several hours on the day. Even after the Twitter site come back online, many site users continuously encountered some problems. The site users were worried that the sites were not working properly.

“We are trying to defend ourselves and recover from this attack,” the message from the company says. After a lot of discussions, Facebook, Twitter and Google worked together to resolve issues in a fairly short period of time. Users are now posting their messages to their followers without any difficulty.

“It is very difficult to identify hackers and when they will attack as they could be anywhere in the world” said John Harrison, a researcher with the Web security firm Symantec. So it is better to update an anti-virus software on your computer frequently, and create password that is difficult to crack and stay away from the cyber attack problems, the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness agency advices.

Power.com is a web service which permits you together all your social networks’ experiences (Facebook, Orkut, Hi5, MySpace, etc.) in one web place. It’s a young Brazilian start up which proposes you to manage all your networks thanks to only one interface.  Facebook decided to suit this website and lodged a complaint on last 30^th December to obtain money damages.

Facebook seems not to approve the principle even if users have to sign and clearly accept the concept on the Power’s site. Facebook affirms that Power is violating its general conditions as well as copyrights on the broad. Facebook reproaches in particular to use facebook’s usernames on power’s servers. In fact, you have just to give your username and password to have access to all your profiles. And these data belong to facebook.

In the last May, Facebook tried to block Google Friend Connect. Now users have to respect rules of Facebook; another way is forbidden.

For the moment Power removed access to Facebook from its service. We have few chance to see come back again.

Facebook doesn’t like to share its members. Remind you that Facebook is as used as Google is with 200 millions of members!

Facebook questions itself about the members’ security.

The European Union already tried to edict some rules to protect users. Facebook decides to organize the data management and delete the six pages and 40 configuration’s possibilities to manage its personal data.

Now users can have a clear vision of their protection, a simplification appreciated. Protecting confidential information will be easier to manage and check. Facebook launches series of tests in this sense and will give some tools to the users.

The 200 millions of members can control their accounts. You can choose your secret information and decide to share some data with a specific group. Facebook tries to replace twitter its main competitor.

The transition will be soft to handle by users. You will choose your “open’s level” thanks to a transition manager. This new security must lead to increase in membership and in consequence rising advertisement incomes.

These measures raise a debate between users. Some people approve these improvements and don’t be more worried. The others don’t understand: the principle of Facebook is to divulge the most information as possible. For them, new rules contradict Facebook’s essence. We may see soon the birth of new groups?

After the Koopface, a new computer virus has been attacked by Facebook users; it is now facing a new attack known as phishing attack. Phishing attacks and online fraud have been growing at a steady rate. Face book strengthens its security infrastructure to fight against phishing attacks that entice users to fraudulence websites to acquire login details from them.  In order to bolster its security systems, it employs Internet fraud security vendor MarkMonitor which enable them to prevent and detect phishing and malware attacks.

Well what exactly phishing attack is? It is a scam that lured facebook users to a fake Web site and demand that they submit login credentials. Initially they will receive a message to click a link on the message. Once they click the link, they will be redirected from Facebook to another site.

The redirected Web site will initially appear as a legitimate Facebook login page, but it is actually a phishing site, created by hackers to steal users’ login credentials.

Recently, facebook users attacked by the following website namely FBStarter . com and BAction . net. In an effort to protect their users, it blocked the FBstarter . com site and taking action to block BAction site.

Facebook advised that users should always check the Web address before logging in to the site. In addition, users should log in with unique passwords for the sites they access. Avoid any message, post or link that asks for login information to protect them from online pickpockets.

Last week, Facebook called its users to cast their vote on its new privacy policy according to which Facebook has ownership over any content, such as images or video, uploaded to the site — even if the original owners deleted their profiles.

When thousands of group members have started protesting against the new policy, Facebook retracted the changed terms, drafted a new set and invited its 200 million members to weigh in. Facebook specified that it requires the participation of 30 % of its community in voting, which is around 60 million Facebookers. Actually less than 1 percent participated in the survey.

Mr. Ted Ullyot, the company’s general counsel acknowledged the low turnout in a blog post on the site, writing, “In the meantime, we’re going to consider lowering the 30 percent threshold that the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities establishes for a user vote to be binding.”

Close to 75 percent of the participants requested for the new terms of services. Mr. Ullyot specified in the post as “We’re pleased that users supported the proposed documents and validated our efforts to respond to their concerns.” And “You can expect to see the new documents on the site in the coming weeks.”

Million’s of Facebook users are in danger zone. Koopface is a new computer virus spread through Facebook message system. It will send the message from the infected person’s profile to his friends, the subject line is like “you look just awesome in this new movie” it will open into another website to watch the movie after clicking the website it shows a message to need an updated Adobe Flash Player. But the virus will download while updating Flash Player. Infected systems have the possibilities of stolen Credit card numbers. “Only a very small percentage of Facebook users have been affected, and we’re working quickly to update our security systems to minimize any further impact,” – Barry Schnitt, the Facebook spokesman in Palo Alto.