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Facebook’s Graph Search feature hasn’t been released yet. But white hat hackers are already harnessing the powerful social search engine to gather sensitive information on Facebook users.

A new module for Recon-ng an open source “web reconnaissance framework” allows anyone with a Facebook Developer account to use Graph Searchand Recon-ng’s features to harvest phone numbers associated with Facebook user accounts. The tool, dubbed “Facebook Harvester” allows brute force searching by partial phone numbers, using brute-force techniques, according to a blog post by Rob Simon, a Canton, Ohio- based security professional.

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Published May 8, 2013 by The Security Ledger

LAS VEGAS — Operators of Cheaterville.com last month filed a $40 million copyright suit against BadBoyReport.com, a rival social network site that is alleged to have “scraped” cheaters’ data and photos.

The suit, filed at U.S. District Court in Las Vegas by adult industry attorney Ronald Green of Randazza Legal Group, says that BadBoyReport lifts its content by an automated process known as “scraping.”

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Published May 7, 2013 by Rhett Pardon on XBIZ Newswire

Ron Bailey can just picture it:  He’s showing a rental listing to some prospects when suddenly, a person he’s never met thunders, “Are you Ron Bailey?”“Well, of course I’m Ron Bailey,” the Pocono Lake, Pa.- based broker would answer.

Then Bailey says, “Things would start to get ugly.”

That’s because, in this scenario, the menacing stranger would have sent a considerable sum of money to someone he thought was Ron Bailey. And while the stranger would have been expecting to receive keys to the property in return, he would not have heard from Bailey again — that is, until confronting Bailey while showing that property to other prospective renters.

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Published on May 2, 2013 by Teke Wiggin on inman.com

Craiglist has long been criticized for a failure to innovate (it has also been criticized for having among the “most draconian” terms of services of any major website on the internet). And instead of innovating, it has chosen to go after new market participants that have wanted to use Craigslist’s data on classified postings.

One of these websites is www.padmapper.com, which was sued for obtaining Craigslist’s data and placing it on a map. This allows for users to more easily aggregate, browse and search all available apartments across various services.

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Published April 30, 2013 by Derek Khanna on Forbes.com

Data scraping and misuse of listing data that belongs to brokers are growing concerns. Many scrapers (or others who receive the data legitimately but use it in ways that violates its licenses) are actively reselling listing data for various uses not intended by brokers, such as statistical or financial reporting.

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Posted Monday April 29, 2013 by RISMedia.