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http://www.wellsphere.com/brain-health-article/hundreds-of-south-african-facebook-profiles-have-been-cloned/1954857 Computer forensics expert Bennie Labuschagne said scammers used programs designed to "deep mine" online accounts to bypass security features."Cloning is very common and it is now like the 419 scams, only on social networks," he said. One of the South African Facebook victims, Dinesh Ramrathan, said yesterday: "A Facebook friend called me to find out why I had sent her a message asking for money online. I then discovered that my page had been duplicated. "My friends were caught off guard and accepted friend requests from the hacker, who then started sending requests for money." The impostor claimed that Ramrathan was in trouble and needed money urgently."I am lucky because all my Facebook friends know me personally outside of the social network so they knew that I was not in trouble," he said. Debby Bonnin's husband received a friend request from her even though they were already Facebook friends. One of sixmillion local users of Facebook, Bonnin said: "My major concern is identity theft and all the possible ramifications of that. On Facebook the prime issue is reputation. But the person behind the false profile could use your identity to access confidential information from your friends and then there could be security or financial problems that arise." Another Facebook user, Josh Delport, said his stored scores and tokens on game applications on the site had disappeared. University of KwaZulu-Natal associate professor of information systems Manoj Maharaj said that, though Facebook could not be hacked because of its hi-tech security features, the affected users might have put themselves at risk by clicking on links to external games, applications and shopping sites. "Users are clicking on these links without realising that their information is being passed on. If one of those sites is hacked, their information, such as credit card details, is easily a

In late 2011 and early 2012, activists, progressive politicians and Internet companies led in part by Internet freedom advocate Aaron Swartz came together to defeat the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). Advertised as measures against copyright infringement, the bills would have opened any website that contained copyrighted material it was not authorized to publish on any of its pages to a forced shutdown. A site that unknowingly held a copyrighted image in a comment section, for instance, would have been eligible as a violator. Virtually everyone was susceptible to closure. The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) followed SOPA and PIPA in April 2012. CISPA was worse than its predecessors, proposing that private companies be allowed to share user information, a provision that would have violated many privacy protections of the Internet. Recognizing this, Swartz fought again. "It sort of lets the government run roughshod over privacy protections and share personal data about you," he said of the bill at the time. Again, he prevailed. Now, a year and a half after Swartz killed himself, there is the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act. CISA is a lot like CISPA, but could end up being even worse. Privacy and civil rights groups including the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are standing up to fight it. In an article about the bill, the ACLU's Sandra Fulton wrote: CISA "poses serious threats to our privacy, gives the government extraordinary powers to silence potential whistleblowers, and exempts these dangerous new powers from transparency laws."