Fergie's Tech Blog

The Move To Web 2.0 Increases Security Challenges

Sharon Gaudin writes on InformationWeek:

Web 2.0 technologies -- the kinds that promote interactivity and community-building and made MySpace and YouTube household names -- are starting to gain a foothold on more conventional Web sites. Web 2.0 largely is about user-generated content. Corporate executives and marketing heads like the idea of having their customers be participants and sharing information, rather than just getting information off the site. An automobile maker, for instance, might start a social network or blog for customers to write about their experiences with their vehicles or to post pictures or videos from their favorite road trips.

But the advantages of creating these communities and enriched Web sites also come with the same risks that plague the Web 2.0 giants. A worm planted in a MySpace page infected more than 1 million users. Hackers and spammers can join MySpace to create their own pages, riddled with malicious code, to infect their social-networking peers. And hackers are beginning to target vulnerabilities in Ajax applications, which help make the Web 2.0 Web sites so dynamic.

posted by Fergie @ 5/24/2007 12:27:00 PM