The value of networking for lawyers cannot be overstated. As a marketing tool, networking can be a law firm’s best advertisement for legal services. The message is carried by the actual service providers who have a stake in its delivery. All the same can be true of online social networking, but the online medium can harbor hidden dangers for lawyers that were highlighted at Black Hat 2008.
Many of the best presentations of Black Hat 2008 didn’t involve examples of new hacking exploits, but instead covered more subtle examples of how personal information and trust could be exploited. The presentation “Satan Is On My Friends List: Attacking Social Networks” by Nathan Hamiel (Idea Information Security) and Shawn Moyer (FishNet Security) provided a harrowing, yet entertaining, look at a number of ways that social networking sites and their users can be exploited.
