The BBC website has reported that the popular social networking site, Facebook, is coming under an increasing number of threats from hackers who are trying to obtain personal information about users of the site. Apparently there have been five separate security problems in the last seven days. The hackers are reported to be creating fake messages padded with details of Facebook members in the hope that they can obtain information and access to users' details by capitalising on the trust and social links that drive the network.

They are also taking advantage of the hundreds of applications that have been developed for Facebook's users, with one malicious application has tried to trick people into adding it by claiming that their friends were having trouble looking at their profile. If the application is added it spams itself to every Facebook friend that a member of the site has. So far, however, security experts say that these rogue applications have been scary and a nuisance more than anything else, but this remains a big concern for the operators of Facebook, and their millions of users.

Facebook had also been under attack from a virus with a new version of the 'Koobface' virus targeting members of the site again, with the previous attack at the end of last year. The new variant uses a Facebook message to try to get people to visit a fake YouTube page and install the malware. To make it look more plausible, the virus posts the image from a Facebook member's profile on the video page. Once installed the malicious program hunts for cookies on a victim's computer and uses the details it finds in the small text files to log into other social sites that person may be a member of.